The Fall Of Geoguessr

Summary

• Geoguessr is a brilliant geography game based on Google Maps.
• Recently, prices increased and free-to-play modes were eliminated.
• The choice to move to a subscription model may hurt the niche game's sustainability and player base.

I tried to play a game of Geoguessr yesterday. I think it was partially borne out of nostalgia, and partially because I watched a YouTube video of one of my favourite outdoors YouTubers, GeoWizard, locating various Wetherspoons across Britain (they were all down south).

I’ve tried locating British Wetherspoons on Geoguessr before, but GeoWizard, as someone who regularly plays the game, is far superior. He, like all good Geoguessr players, knows what signs to look for on Google Maps, how the sun is positioned, the colour of street signs and licence plates, the type of flora at the roadside. None of this matters for hunting a crap English pub, but when you play regular games, it’s vital.

I wondered what it took to become Good at Geoguessr. I don’t want to make high score leaderboards or be able to ‘do a Rainbolt’ and guess the country of a Google Maps snapshot in under a second. But I’d love to be able to fairly accurately pinpoint a country based on Geoguessr’s random drop. It would be a cool party trick, if nothing else.

When I wrote about my experiences with Geoguessr’s pub map before, my colleague Harry Alston helped me identify a pub I screenshotted but failed to note down the name of in under a minute as he recognised it from a previous drinking session. Make of that what you will, but I want this capability for the entire world.

So I logged onto Geoguessr on my old account, ready to jump into another exciting round of geography-based puzzling. Except, I was told I couldn’t. I needed a Pro subscription to continue playing. A Pro subscription which costs, at minimum, £23.88 a year.

As of a few months ago, I found out, there are no more free-to-play modes on Geoguessr. There is no Daily Challenge, which acted like a kind of maps-based Wordle (Worldle, if you will) and brought the community together. If you don’t open your wallet, Geoguessr is completely unplayable.

Geoguessr has always been monetised. In the beforetimes, you could pay a couple of quid a month to have unlimited access to all the website’s myriad game modes. Most were available for free, but in a limited capacity – you could play one round a day. Now, those restrictions have been placed on the lowest tier of paid membership.

If you were already paying £24 a year for an annual Geoguessr subscription, you had the run of the world. If you had kept up the same subscription in the new model, you can only play the game for five minutes every 15 minutes. Not only is that not how anyone plays any video game in the entire world, it’s insulting to the players who helped Geoguessr grow into the hugely popular browser game it is today.

If you want to play unlimited Geoguessr, you have to pay £28.72 a year. Alternatively, you could opt for the premium membership at £47.88, which gives you access to… emotes and skins for your avatar?

I don’t know how many people pay the premium for special Geoguessr skins – I guess I would if I shelled out for a membership – but it doesn’t make any sense. This isn’t Fortnite. I immediately closed my browser and loaded up a different game, disheartened and confused.

How does a niche game like Geoguessr expect to attract new players if there’s no way to try before you buy? I can’t even see the old free trials that it used to offer for Pro memberships. And I cannot get over the gumption of charging twenty four pounds a year for limited access to the game. Five minutes every 15 minutes? Does this timer automatically kick you out of a round if your time is up? Are you shot back into that previous game when your 15 minutes refreshes? It’s an almighty mess, and I hope it doesn’t mess Geoguessr up for good.

The Geoguessr community is still strong. For now. I headed over to the subreddit to see when these prices were introduced, and it’s a recent thing. There are countless threads complaining about the system from a couple of months ago – what happens when loyal subscribers want to jump into a quick match with a friend to share their passion? Why would on-the-fencers who saw the game on TikTok immediately commit to a £24 annual sub? – but no response from the developers.

Prices increased at the same time as free-to-play was eliminated, losing years of goodwill in the process. But the effects are difficult to judge. Geoguessr’s Twitch viewership has trended upwards over the first four months of this year, for the first time in a long while – potentially because of players moving to watching the game if they can’t afford to play it. As for how many players are actively playing the game compared to before the changes, it’s impossible to say.

I’m probably never going to play Geoguessr again. I was never a hardcore players, but it’s a sad thing to hear myself say. I’d happily pay around £20 up front to play the game forever, but instead someone decided that it needed to be another live-service subscription, competing with the likes of Game Pass and Netflix for players’ money. Maybe their profits will prove me wrong, but Geoguessr feels too niche for that kind of monetisation. Surely it isn’t sustainable. But, worse than that, surely it isn’t the right thing to do?

Next: Converting The New Kroot Lone-Spear Into A Space Marine