GeoGuessr is Blowing Up as an International Esports Game

Ten years ago, GeoGuessr was released upon the world and became an overnight sensation – a viral hit. It’s a remarkably basic game with a unique premise: players must pinpoint a real-world location on a map based on a ‘Google Street View’ shot. It has since evolved into a wildly competitive and popular game, boasting more than 40 million players – and last year, GeoGuessr’s first world championship tournament took place. Now, players the world over are shaping up for 2024’s $100,000 GeoGuessr World Cup.

Recently, GeoGuessr flew up the charts on Twitch, reaching a peak viewer count of around 100,000 users. It was mostly thanks to a GeoGuessr tournament, but it was totally out of the ordinary for the game, which typically floats around little more than one or two thousand peak viewers. It’s a testament to the power of GeoGuessr’s competitive scene, though – we never would have thought that watching people play a geographical, educational map-guessing game would have been this intense.

GeoGuessr is on the Map

While GeoGuessr boasts a simple (yet addictive) concept, it can quickly become something much more complex. During the World Cup qualifying stages, competitors are subjected to a range of challenges that massively restrict their abilities in-game. At the toughest end of the spectrum, players will need to accurately pinpoint their location on a world map using nothing more than a single shot taken randomly from Google Street View.

Typically, players will rely on landmarks, flora and fauna, road signs, weather, and even types of soil and cloud formations to assess their location. It’s a race against time, as working quickly to pinpoint your location on a map is one way to generate the most points. The closer a player is to marking the correct location on a map, the more points they’ll be awarded – it’s effectively that simple. However, there are geographical geniuses out there with otherworldly abilities to deduce exactly where they are based on a single plant or the architecture of a nearby building.

Money to be Made

In a couple of weeks, the final stage for the Americas World Cup Qualifiers will take place in a GeoGuessr studio, with $14,400 sitting on the line. From there, the next step is hosting the EMEA Qualifiers, and then the APAC Qualifiers. In September, the Grand Final takes place somewhere in the world – typically in a small stadium or esports venue. There’s a $50,000 prize pool on the line for that particular event, which is a huge sum of money for such a simple game.

Like any esports game, there’s a core following for GeoGuessr that’s bolstered by the fact that so many people enjoy it. It may have taken nine years for GeoGuessr to find its feet as a truly competitive game, but it’s now wasting no time in building up an esports profile.