What was this?

In June 2018, Niantic ran the Beyond Reality contest with 1 million US Dollars in the reward pool for the winners. 10 submitted projects were selected to get access to Niantic tools and data, and then they were judged and scored.

None of these projects has yet resulted in a playable game.

The main reason for this is simple: These proposals were relying on getting that prize money for winning to continue on, and the ones that didn't win were abandoned for being too expensive to develop or maintain independently. Since the contest, a few companies have developed their own AR plans similar to the setup Niantic has, and there are a few competing services for 'playable locations' to provide a set of points similar to Niantic's database. PraxisMapper fits in this last category, as something you can host yourself without needing to pay a 3rd party or giving them a data feed of player activity.

The results were announced on October 17, 2019.

The Games

1st place: Run To My Heart by JCsoft. The team changed names to Talofa Games and expanded to 16 staff. Their Twitter account, which has only been used to promote open positions in the company, has been silent since June 2021.

2nd place: Wild SanctuARy by Dibs Studio. The app remains unavailable on any mobile app store, but the company continues to keep the game demonstrated at the top of their list of work.

3rd place: cryptOS by Escality. All of the developers on this app were hired by Niantic in March 2020, and the studio and game were abandoned.

Kymera, by Triheart, has a really good write-up of their time working on their game that got an Honorable Mention result and was abandoned.

ExplorAR, the other apparent Honorable Mention, has their own write-up of their game and experience working on it before abandoning it.

BioSquad-K, by Mechachicken, was abandoned immediately after the results. This group may have been involved in making Test Tube Titans on itch.io before rebranding as Unormal Games.

Hitpoint Studios made The Gettysburg Battlefield, and apparently dropped the project after not winning. The company was later purchased by Penn National Gaming, a corporation that makes gambling games.

Happy Giant's project was called "Project: Cute vs Chaos". The list of games they've worked on doesn't contain anything that obviously maps to this codename. Their biggest work on games is the Sam and Max VR game.

Flint and Steam by Land Lubber Games looked to be the most game-y of the entries. It's still mentioned on the HawaiiAR site that currently seems to be it's main page, but no download links are available. The other apps presented there are AR novelties, primarily focused on 'Christmas Card' themed apps or games.

Ninth Wonder was the name of a student team from Vancouver, Canada that submitted a game named Novagarde. The whole of their documentation on their submission I can find is cakes being cut to celebrate reaching milestones. None of the students that I can find that worked on the project discuss anything else about it. It is safe to say this project was instantly abandoned, possibly before the contest ended.

Summary

6 out of the 10 groups that participated dissolved or were bought out within a year. Out of the groups that continue, they seem to be doing the same thing that Niantic has: pivoting from a focus on geography to AR. I find this to be a shame, since Niantic-style AR (Drawing app content on top of a camera feed) isn't a particularly new tech. Wikitude appears to be the first use of this style of presentation, and it was released in 2008. They've kept up and continue developing features for their platform.

The aspect of GPS games that I found interesting was the use of real-world locations as gameplay elements. The unique thing they offered was a reason to move, exercise, and explore during routine breaks or days out. The AR apps out there now look to be focused heavily on marketing content to you and less on actually playing a game. They might want a big open area to play in, or they might be happy to work in your living room. I want games to be used to better the player, not just to funnel them to a store to buy their way to a dopamine hit. I'm hoping to see Run To My Heart actually get released so that we see new games that keep using real world geography to the player's advantage.