I'm temporarily reviving this account to explain a bit the situation about #Geoguessr becoming paid only (sort of). You can find a French version below.
So until recently Geoguessr could be played for free. You could get a Pro account only for more features like map editor.
So until recently Geoguessr could be played for free. You could get a Pro account only for more features like map editor.
But now you can only play a low version of the world map with a free account. Everything else requires pro. The reason is simple: the game costs too much money to maintain. For your information, Geoguessr isn't the main activity of its developers. Just a small side project.
It started in 2013 as an experiment by a swedish guy. But it increased in popularity so he formed a small team and created a business (Geoguessr AB) for administrative purposes. They only work on the game on their free time as they have actual jobs to live.
During the years the game ran fine, the pro users could pay the costs. They probably even got extra money. But last year something happened: Google decided to change their API prices. Why this is important? Because Geoguessr uses Google services: Maps and Streetview.
You may not know as you don't pay anything when browsing Google Maps but it's not free to use it when you load their data on an external website like Geoguessr. You have to pay fees ever time a map or a Streetview panorama is loaded. And that happens for each Geoguessr game.
So Google decided to increase their prices in 2018. By 14. Yes, 14. Suddenly it costs 14 times more to use Google's data. It was a terrible news as many web services using Google Maps had to shut down or switch to some alternative (OpenStreetMap being the most popular one).
But while you can find alternatives for maps, for Streetview... it's almost impossible. The only competitors worth are Bing (Microsoft) and Yandex (Russian Google) but their coverage is not even comparable to what Streetview was in 2010. No way they can replace Google Streetview.
Geoguessr is now stuck with Google and it's monopoly, with prices 14× higher than before. This is where devs started to displays ads at the bottom of the game. But this wasn't enough to counter the price increase. So they added more ads between rounds with a timer.
This was still not enough. At this point the game was surviving probably thanks to the earned money from the previous years... But eventually those savings are going to run out as well. And with the recent popularity burst from big streamers, they had to push this update quickly.
Since the game loads two Google service per played game or map editor opening, I estimate the costs to be around $0.02 (one game being 5 rounds). I calculated this using Google table price. It's probably lower as Google offers special plans for large amount of data but...
... they so have to pay server hosting, taxes etc so let's assume this balances those costs. Two cents per game looks nothing but the game has thousands of plays daily according to map stats so the monthly cost goes quickly above thousands of dollars.
Clearly pro users were not enough to pay the expenses so Geoguessr has no more choices other than paywalling everything using Google data. This is why free users now have one free trial world map using Mapillary, a crowd sourced site offering pictures made by regular people.
Yes, Mapillary is the best alternative to Google Streetview in terms of coverage. This shows how powerful Google's monopoly is and why they can increase their prices like they want. Geoguessr devs are not to blame for what's happening. This is all from Google.
So yes they will lost lot of players. But this is needed. They need to have less players especially non pro users as those players are a pure loss for the game financially. It's sad and paradoxical but this is how it works when you pay for every played game.
Now the game can survive with only pro users. Since the game costs scale with the amount of pro users, it's not a problem is many people decide to not take or keep pro. And sadly devs can't offer a free map to play as the problem lies to loading data from Google.
Even if they let, says, one free game per account, people will just keep making new accounts and the problem will be back quickly. But for now you can still play for free using challenge links, probably because most of the costs came from people using regular play button.
So even if this may stop in the future in the case of too many people using challenges, for now you can use them so enjoy while you can! Hope all this writing allowed you to understand more, it's sad that developers have zero comm with the users, people would be...
... more comprehensive if they were explained the situation but... we kept telling them that and they never do it. But you can't really blame them about the paywall, they are forced to live with Google's decision and we can't do anything about this, I'm afraid. That's it.
To keep following this, the game Eighty Clicks (a Geoguessr clone) also had to become paid only after too much people played it. Costs increased too quickly and too much. Some people hoped this could become an alternative, sadly it won't.
Update: one free game is now available each day for all non pro accounts. It's more like a test for now (probably to see how much it will cost). Works on any map.
