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Online Multiplayer Games for Crowdsourcing the Development of Digital Assets

The Case of Ingress

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Software Business (ICSOB 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 370))

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Abstract

Crowdsourcing has emerged as a cost-efficient solution for companies to resolve certain tasks requiring vast amounts of human input. In order to motivate participants to harness their best efforts for the crowdsourcing task, companies are gamifying or creating complete games around crowdsourcing problems. The location-based game Ingress integrated the development of a geographically distributed database of points of interest in its game design. Players submitted and later peer-reviewed PoI candidates for Niantic for free, who then used the crowdsourced database as backbone for such popular games as Pokémon GO and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. This study analyzes the solution in Ingress from two main perspectives: (1) how the game motivates players to participate in the crowdsourcing tasks and (2) how crowdsourcing fits into the game creator Niantic’s revenue model. The results show that Ingress players are provided multi-layered motivation to participate in crowdsourcing. The crowdsourcing tasks influence the game world, but are not limited inside it, and can be used elsewhere. Adopting crowdsourcing as a business strategy has served Niantic well, making Niantic an international multi-billion dollar company. Therefore it is predicted that more online multiplayer games implementing crowdsourcing as a revenue stream are likely to emerge in the near future.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Future Technologies, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Samuli Laato & Sonja M. Hyrynsalmi

  2. Department of Teacher Education, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Samuli Laato

  3. Faculty of Humanities, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Mauri Paloheimo

Authors
  1. Samuli Laato
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  2. Sonja M. Hyrynsalmi
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  3. Mauri Paloheimo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sonja M. Hyrynsalmi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tampere University of Technology, Pori, Finland

    Sami Hyrynsalmi

  2. University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Mari Suoranta

  3. University of South-Eastern Norway, Bø i Telemark, Norway

    Anh Nguyen-Duc

  4. University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Pasi Tyrväinen

  5. University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Pekka Abrahamsson

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Laato, S., Hyrynsalmi, S.M., Paloheimo, M. (2019). Online Multiplayer Games for Crowdsourcing the Development of Digital Assets. In: Hyrynsalmi, S., Suoranta, M., Nguyen-Duc, A., Tyrväinen, P., Abrahamsson, P. (eds) Software Business. ICSOB 2019. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 370. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33742-1_31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33742-1_31

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