Ingress Prime

November 2012 - Not Dead Yet

Limping Towards Death

Ingress has been compared to geocaching and capture the flag. Players are called “agents” and have to choose to join one of two teams called “factions” to compete in regions called “cells” by drawing triangles called “fields” to influence the populations living under those fields called “mind units.” Following the success of Pokémon Go, Niantic knew that the community wanted flashier graphics and CPU-intensive animations that would drain their batteries faster than ever before, and Ingress Prime was born.

As the only title, besides Field Trip, wholly owned by Niantic, everybody can rest assured that there are no plans to kill it.

There are indications that Ingress Prime is losing its appeal among agents. For instance, the December anomalies could have been better attended, with fewer than 200 agents showing up at the primary site, including Niantic employees. Additionally, the black market site Xgress, which provided access to a scraped database of Ingress data, announced that it was shutting down because it was no longer profitable.