Abstract
This chapter examines the entrance of location-based gaming into the app ecology and their subsequent popularisation and commercialisation. I outline how the ubiquity of smartphones coupled with the digital distribution model of the app ecology grant location-based game designers a near-globally universal platform to reach millions of players around the world, vastly increasing their potential audiences and profitability. But as I demonstrate, despite this shift, location-based gaming apps are yet to move beyond conservative, derivative game designs nor provide their designers with a sustainable business model over the long-term. Through an analysis of the political economy of location-based gaming apps and developers—from Niantic’s Ingress (2013) and Pokémon Go (2016) to Kickstarter-funded games like Zombies, Run! (Six to Start & Naomi Alderman, 2012)—I outline how the affordances, constraints, and imperatives of the app ecology shape location-based games’ design.
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- 1.
One exception is Nokia’s N-Gage , released in 2003. It is a hybrid mobile phone and game console. Although it sold over 3 million units worldwide, it is widely acknowledged as a failure and was effectively discontinued in 2006. See Toor (2014).
- 2.
Until 2016, the split in earnings was 70% to developers and 30% to the platform owner. In 2016, Google changed this to 85:15 for all developers. Apple soon followed suit, but iOS developers receive this split only if they have been paying the annual developers’ subscription fee of US$99 for at least 12 months.
- 3.
There were some exceptions to this model. Area/Code’s game Plundr, for instance, was originally developed for PC and released for the Nintendo DS handheld console in 2007. It used the DS’s WiFi, rather than GPS, to determine the player’s location. See: http://web.archive.org/web/20180109051225/http://areacodeinc.com/projects/plundr/
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Leorke, D. (2019). Location-Based Gaming’s Second Phase (2008–Present). In: Location-Based Gaming. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0683-9_4
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