Top community mapmakers for the geography guessing game GeoGuessr have disabled their carefully curated maps in protest against the game’s participation in the Esports World Cup (EWC) held in Saudi Arabia. This coordinated action has seriously disrupted both casual and competitive play, as these community-created maps make up the backbone of high-level GeoGuessr competition.
The protest is aimed at GeoGuessr‘s involvement with Saudi Arabia, a country frequently criticized for its human rights record. Many mapmakers and players see the game’s participation in the Saudi-funded tournament as helping “sportswashing”—using sports events to polish a country’s global image while glossing over controversial policies.
GeoGuessr, launched in 2013, challenges players to identify their location based on Google Street View images. While the game includes official maps, the community-created ones have become the top pick for competitive play thanks to their careful curation. These volunteer mapmakers spend months or even years finding great locations that avoid poor image quality or weird Street View issues.
The mapmakers used different tricks to prevent people from using their maps—some hid them, some made them unusable, and a lot just switched them to private. This pretty much wrecked the competitive scene, since tournaments, ranking events, and high-stakes matches all rely on these maps for fair, consistent gameplay.
“The official maps made by GeoGuessr are nowhere near the quality of the community maps and no one would normally play them,” explained one player, highlighting just how much this protest matters. Without these hand-picked collections, competitive play has been thrown into chaos, with organizers scrambling for alternatives.
This shows just how much GeoGuessr relies on unpaid volunteer work. Years ago, the game switched to a subscription model to help pay for Google Maps API costs. Still, it never stopped relying on its passionate community to build the content that keeps competitive play alive. This protest is one of those rare moments where a game’s community used its crucial role to push back against decisions from the top.
Saudi money talks but Geoguessr won’t walk
The GeoGuessr protest is part of a bigger issue in esports as Saudi Arabia keeps pumping money into gaming tournaments, teams, and organizations. The kingdom has spent billions on the industry as a way to branch out its economy, putting game developers and tournament organizers in a tricky spot—they may need the investment, but risk getting serious criticism from communities worried about ethics.
So far, GeoGuessr hasn’t said anything official about the protest. And while the company could try to restore maps from backups, doing that might just make things worse with the mapmaking community that is the heart of its competitive scene.
