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.