WorldGuessr vs Geotastic

You need an account, and here is why

The first thing Geotastic tells a new visitor is that using it requires a free account. The mode grid on the front page sits dimmed behind the words "Create an account to play for free", the quick play page has a single button that says "Log in to play", and the daily challenge tile says the same. Guests can join someone else's lobby with a code, and that is all.

The reason is money, and Geotastic is refreshingly direct about it. Every panorama a player loads costs the developer a Google API fee, the site tracks how much each account has cost, and the front page shows how far the month's bill is from being covered. In the developer's words on the FAQ, "Since the game is being played using my Google API key, the monthly costs are immense. So I am heavily dependent on paying players." An account is how that accounting works.

WorldGuessr pays the same kind of Google bill with banner ads instead, so it can let you start a round without signing up. A free account on WorldGuessr is only for ranked duels, 2v2 and saved progress.

What the supporter levels unlock

Geotastic's model is donations with permanent benefits. You pay once, at any of six levels from EUR 3 to EUR 100, and each level unlocks things you keep forever. The developer calls it donation-ware, and the site says plainly: "No subscriptions, no strings attached."

Level 1, EUR 3, is the one most people will care about. It unlocks custom local and online lobbies, making your own maps and challenges, and lobbies of 12 players. Without it, the custom game tiles read "Locked: unlock with Supporter Level 1 or by waiting until this month's API costs are financed by other players", so hosting a game for friends depends on either your EUR 3 or everyone else's. Level 2, EUR 7, adds a place on the ranked leaderboards, detailed statistics and lobbies of 25. Levels 3 to 5, at EUR 15, 25 and 50, raise the lobby to 50, 75 and 100 players and add squads and events. Level 6, EUR 100, gives you a private customisable lobby and, uniquely, ads off for good.

On WorldGuessr all of that is free: map making, ranked play, the leaderboard, parties of up to 200, and private parties, because banner ads pay the bill instead.

Ads

Both games run display ads. What is different on Geotastic is how you get rid of them. Its donations page says that buying a supporter level does not by itself make the game ad-free: "The ad-free option is reserved for all players with a positive account balance independent of their supporter level. So you need to have donated more than you played." Once your play has cost more than you gave, the ads come back, unless you are at level 6, or you use what the FAQ calls heat mode, where every EUR 3 buys a month without ads.

As a visitor we saw ordinary display banners, one large unit in the page and one pinned to the bottom, and nothing more. Geotastic's account settings mention a video-ad-free option, so video ads exist for signed-in players in some form, but we did not see one and cannot tell you when they appear. We also found no mention of ad-blocker detection on any page a visitor can read. WorldGuessr shows banner ads around the game and sells nothing, so there is no way to turn them off, and nothing to watch before a round.

Modes

Geotastic's front page lists Quick Play, Highscore Hunts, Challenges, custom local and online games, GeoBingo, a Twitch mode where a streamer's chat submits the guesses, and seasonal events. GeoBingo, where players race to fill a bingo board of locations, and the Twitch mode have no equivalent on WorldGuessr, and highscore hunts and challenges are a whole layer of asynchronous competition that WorldGuessr does not have. Because a round is behind the login, we cannot describe how any of them play.

WorldGuessr's list is the classic round, No Move and NMPZ, a three-round daily with streaks, Country Guesser and Continent Guesser, ranked duels, 2v2, an unranked queue, and parties of up to 200 that can split into team duels. They are GeoGuessr's own modes, built the same way, so anyone coming from there already knows every one of them. Good for a group, and you can be in one within a minute of opening the site.

Maps and No Move

On community maps, WorldGuessr has 72,316 at the time of writing, each with its own page, and making one is free. On Geotastic, playing community maps is free with an account and making one needs level 1, EUR 3.

WorldGuessr's No Move and NMPZ rounds are drawn by its own renderer, with no road name labels and no Google controls on screen. Moving rounds on WorldGuessr use Google's own Street View panorama, so road names show there just as they do on GeoGuessr. Only No Move and NMPZ rounds use WorldGuessr's renderer. We could not check how Geotastic handles road labels, since we never reached a panorama without an account.

Apps and languages

Geotastic has no mobile apps and says it will not build them. Its FAQ: "Geotastic is a browser game at heart and dealing with all the overhead of bundling and releasing (and fixing) native store releases is too much work for me alone." WorldGuessr has native Android and iOS apps; the Android app is rated 4.8 out of 5 by a little under 700 people at the time of writing.

We found no language setting anywhere a visitor can reach on Geotastic, and the site is in English. WorldGuessr is fully translated into English, German, Spanish, French and Russian.

Source code

Geotastic's code is closed. Its FAQ carries the question of whether it will go open source, and the last time we could read the answer it said there was no plan to. WorldGuessr's code is public at github.com/codergautam/worldguessr under the PolyForm Noncommercial license. That is not the same as open source in the strict sense, because you may not sell it or run it commercially, but anyone can read how locations are picked, how scoring works and how ratings move, and can run their own copy for personal or classroom use.

Where Geotastic is better

It has run since 2020, it is still updated every few days, and its developer explains the economics of a Street View game more honestly than anyone else in this genre, down to a running total of what your own play has cost. GeoBingo and the Twitch mode are ideas nobody else has, highscore hunts and challenges give it a competitive layer that does not need anyone else online, and for a group that is happy to have one person pay EUR 3 once, it is a lot of game.