Niantic has a handful of different AR games out there at this point. From their origins with Ingress to their claim to fame, Pokémon GO, they provide plenty of reasons to walk around town. And here soon, they’ll be providing a way for all of their user base to connect together. Introducing Campfire: a community-based social app.

Campfire is meant to be a way for users of their various games to connect locally. Displaying a top-down map of their environment, users can signal out flares, indicating locations to others that might be of interest. Maybe that’s a rare Pokémon Gym encounter or a noteworthy Pikmin fruit. The flares are anonymous and will disappear after 10 minutes.

It will also offer connectivity with Niantic’s apps. In the upper-right corner will be a list of connected games. From that, users can synchronize their profile, friend list, and ID. This way, becoming friends with a new person on the various games can be done quick and easily. 

The app is intended to be a singular place to organize meetups, find new friends with like interests, and sharing content with each other. How successful it might be has yet to be seen. This very much seems like an app of convenience for the company’s dedicated player base, so we can imagine it getting quite a bit of use. But, like all corporate concepts, we wonder how sustainable it will be, since monetization was not mentioned. Niantic doesn’t seem to be in the position to waste money right now, after all.

Access to Campfire will first roll out to select Pokémon GO players. They’re looking to get everything rolled out by the end of Summer this year. But we will see. Campfire will be available on both iOS and Android when it does release.