[MUSIC PLAYING]
GREG BORRUD: This is the type of thing
that we fantasized about in sci-fi films not too long ago,
and now it's real.
It's part of our everyday lives, and people love it.
Hi, my name is Greg Borrud, and I am the Vice President
of Games at Niantic.
Niantic is an AR company which is inspiring people
to explore the world together.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
What I'm seeing from an engagement perspective
is just the number of games out there.
There are, I don't know--
Google probably knows better than me--
thousands of games that launched today.
[LAUGHS] So I mean, there are so many new games
and new opportunities that are out there.
What is the discovery like?
How do people engage with new products?
The reality is once people find the game that they love,
they stick with it.
When we think about engaging with new players in our games,
we think about several different stages
of how they might engage with us.
So the first, most important thing is, does this game--
in the first couple days, does it
deliver on their expectations?
The second thing we think about in the next phase
is that core gameplay loop.
Is there something that allows them to engage in the game
several times a day?
The long-term for us comes down to the social part of the game.
Who are you engaging with?
What are those core gameplay loops
that turn into meta loops that keep you coming back
for a year or two years or four years or 10 years?
That's a tough thing to do.
We think that the social interactions
are one way to do that.
I think back to my first GO Fest in Chicago in 2018
and seeing the experiences on people's faces
as they ran around this park collecting Pokemon
or participating in battles.
That kind of shared experience was incredibly inspiring.
One of the things I'm incredibly excited about in the world
right now of entertainment is really
the world of immersive experiences,
whether it's immersive theater companies like Punchdrunk
and what they've done with shows like "Sleep No More,"
or whether it's the rise of escape rooms,
or whether it's the things that amusement parks are doing
to really create these immersive worlds that you walk into
and you become a part of.
It's a new form of entertainment that,
at least for me, is incredibly, incredibly exciting.
For me, immersive experiences in that kind of environment
is something that we think is at the core of augmented reality.
There's been a ton of changes in the last five years.
I mean, one, the platforms have evolved incredibly.
If you think about the evolution of mobile
and smartphones and the technology
we have, not just in the rendering power
of these devices, which are getting incredible,
but the GPSs that we have.
And now, with the addition of 5G,
we can pretty much do anything within a mobile phone.
It's literally like having and carrying a platform with you
wherever you go.
But also, when you add a layer of AR on top of it,
it completely changes the way not only
you play games but the way you look at the world.
The multiplayer experiences are going
to be the things that really define the next 5 to 10 years.
In the coming years, we're going to see some amazing strides
being taken part in the industry to create really dynamic shared
worlds and multiplayer experiences
through our mobile devices.
That means you need to have really fast bandwidth.
[LAUGHS]
You got to have really quick pings to players, especially
players that are around you, and be
able to do that in a reliable way.
As processing power increases and network speed capabilities
are expanded, we're going to see an explosion of content
harnessing the power of these technologies.
If we look 5 or 10 years into the future,
I think the way we see the world is going to be very different.
And I think it's going to depend on how
you want to see the world.
Do you want to live in that "Pokemon GO" world?
Do you want to live in that "Harry Potter" world?
Do you want to live in a world that is a game board?
There's so many different possibilities.
And that's where we're going to be really pushing
the boundaries of what people want
to experience-- those experiences that they
want to have.
[MUSIC PLAYING]