Pokemon GO took off with incredible momentum with its release in July 2016. Crowds of people young and old were looking at their phones more than usual and walking around in an apparent trance swiping their screens. But by the fall of 2016, many of the players had grown bored or lost their enthusiasm. Some reports suggested that 33% or more of the original players had retired and stopped going to the “gym”, so to speak.

Many don’t know that Pokemon GO was released by a company that has had another successful augmented reality game in the works since 2012. That’s right, Niantic Labs, which started as an internal startup at Google and later became its own entity, produced a fun and somewhat popular AR game called Ingress years before Pokemon GO. Ingress started with a small launch that was invite-only and Android-only and then began to expand with a reported 500,000 players in 2013, then 2 million in 2014, and then Niantic reported 7 million players in 2015. Although it’s hard to find as many as According to the Current figures, there are still over 4.5 million subscribers to the Ingress Google+ community and many avid gamers.

So I’m suggesting that Niantic can learn a few things to improve Pokémon GO from their other Ingress game. The two are already linked. Most of the PokéStops and Gyms in Pokémon GO are located in the well-mapped “portals” of the Ingress game. In fact, I already suggested in a sarcastic article on my own blog that we can blame the Enlightened faction of Ingress for the appearance of Pokémon. If you want to read more about that, just search for “Pokemon GO: I blame the enlightened ones” (those of you who have played Ingress will know that the enlightened ones were always trying to welcome the strange XM anomalies and open the portals to allow the mysterious forces arrive on earth, while the Resistance was trying to protect earth from some alien force entering our realm).

5 income features that would benefit Pokémon GO

1) An intelligence map: Ingress has a map available to all players around the world that shows each portal and which team owns it. You can zoom into your local lanes and see which portals are open, which ones have been taken over by your enemy, and which ones your team still owns. Imagine if you could see this for gyms and Pokemon stops you might not even know exist.

2) Notifications and in-game chat: Ingress allows you to chat with teammates and enemies in-game, and see updates when a portal is under attack. This could be fun in Pokémon.

3) Ability to trade items with other players.: Have you ever run out of revives, potions or pokeballs? Imagine if you could borrow something from your teammates in the heat of battle instead of having to walk around and find PokéStops to stock up. In Ingress, you can drop items for other players that have a 12 hour decay clock and so if you don’t pick them up they disappear from the scanner map. The only problem is that opponents can grab them too. So you have to be cunning. But this method would be great for freeing up space in your backpack or storage from time to time. Another option is an NPC in gyms that stores trades for you or a team member.

4) Shields and protection: In Ingress you can collect shields and weapon items that help protect your portals by altering the effectiveness of attacks, or even turrets that attack players on the opposing team when they get too close to a portal. This could be tweaked a bit for Pokemon Go by adding extra difficulty to gym battles or perhaps causing the scanner to display incorrect information for a period of time, etc. There are many options. Perhaps one could be a Team Rocket sabotage when 3 or more opponents try to take over a gym.

5) Community events: Ingress has big events in key cities and locations where teams come to compete or complete tasks in the area in a set amount of time. It creates a lot of community and strategic planning and it would be interesting if something similar could carry over to Pokémon GO. I imagine an area of ​​a city with dense pokestops and gym locations. In-game prizes will be offered to the team that accomplishes tasks like taking over 5 gyms for their team, raising them to level 6, and making the Pokemon King of all gyms a Vaporean. The first team to do it gets bonus coins and potions or evolves rarely or something like that.