Who does GeoGuessr
compete with?
When I retired from GeoGuessr, I bought The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It's incredible. But it did not fill the hole GeoGuessr left behind. Zelda is something I played. GeoGuessr is something I practiced.
Games vary in how much thinking they require. Chess at the top. Wordle in the middle. Candy Crush at the bottom. But there's a second axis: whether there's anything you can do to get better besides playing.
Put them together and you get something like this.
To see whether other people agreed, I recruited 80 Americans to a survey last week and asked them to plot 12 games on the same grid. (I grouped GeoGuessr, MapTap, and other map-based geography games into one category.)
Chess and Candy Crush landed where you'd expect. But GeoGuessr, Wordle, and several others split: some people saw them as something you just play, others as something you practice.
Games where the players are split have a harder problem. How do you build a game deep enough to reward practice without making practice the price of admission?
12 games plotted by how much thinking and practice they involve
80 respondents recruited to an online survey. Each respondent indicated which games/apps they were familiar with, then plotted each one they knew on the graph. Data collected September, 2026.
Practice versus a pleasant diversion
I've been thinking about this question because I recently published an article recapping two years of competitive GeoGuessr. It made its way to their headquarters in Stockholm, and I got an email from their Head of Growth.
He and his team had built a dashboard to help competitive players find their weaknesses, and they wanted feedback. They believed the biggest reason players quit isn't losing. It's not knowing what to practice.
It was an odd position to be in. For a living, I help companies understand their customers. On this call, I was the customer: someone who'd invested two years into the game and had opinions about what the dashboard should show.
At the end of the call I asked who they think GeoGuessr competes with.
I've dwelled on that question because it isn't the right one. Before you can name the competition, you have to know what people want from GeoGuessr. For me, it was something to practice. And in that sense GeoGuessr's competition wasn't another game. It was the plateau. Nothing was going to pull me away from GeoGuessr except the feeling that I'd stopped getting better at it. Which is, in the end, exactly what happened.
Duolingo knows this. So does every app that promises to teach you something, whether it's guitar, cooking, or meditation. Users quit when they stop feeling like they're improving.
A lot of "brain workout" games have a version of the dashboard we discussed. Chess.com flags your bad moves. Wordle's bot tells you which guesses would have gotten you closer to the correct word.
For casual players, it's harder for me to say who GeoGuessr competes with. I'm two years removed from being one. My guess is Wordle, Sudoku, and the rest of the brain-workout-but-you-just-play-it quadrant. But that's a guess.
To find out, I ran a second survey. I recruited 200 Americans 18+ and asked which of the 12 games from the plotting exercise they play. Then I looked at what else geo-game players play, weighted against how often each game gets played by everyone (since some games are just big, and would show up no matter who you asked).
Geo-game players were disproportionately likely to play Immaculate Grid, Connections, and Wordle. So if I were looking for GeoGuessr's competition among casual players, I'd start there, not Sudoku, and not solitaire or Candy Crush.
What else do geography-game players play?
200 Americans ages 18+ recruited to a separate online survey about which games/apps they play. Lift compares how often geography-game players play each game with how often all respondents do. Data collected September, 2026.
| Also plays | GeoGuessr, MapTap players | Everyone | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| Immaculate Grid (any sports-trivia game) | 71.4% | 25.8% | 2.77 |
| Connections | 61.2% | 29.8% | 2.05 |
| Wordle | 77.6% | 41.9% | 1.85 |
| Chess | 65.3% | 37.9% | 1.72 |
| Poker | 71.4% | 42.4% | 1.68 |
| A competitive video game (Call of Duty, EA FC, or Rocket League) | 75.5% | 48.0% | 1.57 |
| Sudoku | 77.6% | 51.0% | 1.52 |
| A casual console video game (The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario) | 91.8% | 61.1% | 1.50 |
| Candy Crush, Royal Match (any match-3 puzzle game) | 83.7% | 65.2% | 1.28 |
| Crossword puzzle | 83.7% | 68.7% | 1.22 |
| Solitaire, FreeCell (any single-player card game) | 75.5% | 68.7% | 1.10 |
I also sorted the data by how many people play each game, and by how many other games that game's players play.
The two lists correlate. Solitaire is the most played game, and its players play the fewest other games. GeoGuessr is the least played, and its players play the most. That's not a fact about geography fans. It's a fact about games with small user bases: the people who find them are usually people who play a lot of games.
Which means even the casual GeoGuessr players in this sample aren't casual gamers. They're gamers, playing GeoGuessr casually.
How many people play each game—and what else do they play?
200 Americans ages 18+ recruited to a separate online survey about which games/apps they play. The table shows each game’s play rate and the average number of other games its players play. Data collected September, 2026.
| Game | Play rate | Avg. other games its players play |
|---|---|---|
| Immaculate Grid (any sports-trivia game) | 25.8% | 9.0 |
| GeoGuessr, MapTap (any map-based geo game) | 24.7% | 8.9 |
| Connections | 29.8% | 8.0 |
| Duolingo | 29.3% | 7.6 |
| Chess | 37.9% | 7.4 |
| Wordle | 41.9% | 7.3 |
| Poker | 42.4% | 6.8 |
| A competitive video game (Call of Duty, EA FC, or Rocket League) | 48.0% | 6.7 |
| Sudoku | 51.0% | 6.4 |
| A casual console video game (The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario) | 61.1% | 6.3 |
| Candy Crush, Royal Match (any match-3 puzzle game) | 65.2% | 5.9 |
| Crossword puzzle | 68.7% | 5.8 |
| Solitaire, FreeCell (any single-player card game) | 68.7% | 5.5 |
GeoGuessr already knows this, whether from data or just instinct. Every ring of new players they reach will be less of a gamer than the last one. The Daily challenge, party mode, free-friend invites, country mode: these features are for people chasing fun, not a competitive edge, and they may never play a single competitive Duel.
Still, none of these features make GeoGuessr as easy to pick up, or as easy to share, as Wordle. And that gap isn't only a design problem. Every GeoGuessr round pulls imagery from Google Street View, and Google charges for it. Wordle's marginal cost is effectively zero, which is why the free GeoGuessr version is fairly limited.
The other disadvantage is harder to fix. Even if the Street View API were free tomorrow, a game you can practice will always be shaped more by the people who practice it.
Only one of them is talking
Every product has heavy users and light ones, and every company feels the pull of optimizing too hard for either. Casual users are where scale comes from. They want something that works immediately.
Heavy users are the minority but more valuable. In games like GeoGuessr, they're the ones making the videos, writing the guides, and building the culture that makes the thing worth joining.
You'd want to hear from both kinds of players. But some make themselves much easier to hear.
When GeoGuessr ships something, the competitive players on Discord erupt. It's a contest to see who can dunk on the developers hardest. I would know because I'm guilty of doing exactly that. (For instance I really dislike the decay system.)
When they ship something people genuinely like, such as clubs, nobody hands out credit. It becomes obvious in retrospect that clubs were a good idea.
Meanwhile, casual players try the new thing. Maybe they show a friend. Maybe they don't come back. The people who've never heard of GeoGuessr, or saw it in the app store and scrolled past, are more invisible still.
This is a problem for any company whose product rewards experience: Photoshop, Strava, GeoGuessr. The feedback starts to resemble a gathering of its most invested users, sorted by how annoyed they are. It's not a picture of who else might play.
If your loudest users are unrepresentative by definition, the fix isn't a better way to listen to them. It's finding the people who'd never think to speak in the first place. That means a poll of ordinary people, gamers and non-gamers. It's slower and more expensive than reading Discord comments. But it's the only way to hear from someone who tried your product once, said nothing, and left, or never tried it at all.
Zelda can't hurt me
That's a strange thing for me to be telling GeoGuessr. Last month, they asked me for feedback as a user. Now, here I am, telling them how to get some from everyone else too.
I'd love to land GeoGuessr as a client. But if two years of playing this game competitively says anything, it's that I want it to become the next Wordle whether or not I'm the one who helps it get there.
Most games ask you to live in one quadrant. GeoGuessr doesn't make you choose. It's a brain workout that you can do just for fun, or practice. I picked the first kind of relationship, then the second found me.
Zelda never became that kind of project for me. I finished it. It's over. I don't miss it. I do miss seeing a Central Sulawesi pole and knowing, before the timer runs out, exactly where I am.