This game has become a victim of its own success. Niantic has be strangely silent about bugs and server outages. I foresee a massive drop in interest soon.
I keep seeing these comments foretelling the "inevitable" doomsday from the development community. This is a surprising sentiment. What Pokemon Go has shown, regardless of its future success, is a new ceiling for mobile app virality.
Also notable is that people always cite the issues as the reason for failure. But these issues have affected the app since day 0. Pokemon Go is having this success despite its technical flaws. Further evidence that building the right product trumps building a flawless product.
I say flip the narrative. What Pokemon Go has shown is that a product that fills a burning desire can achieve what seems like unprecedented success levels, quickly. The app doesn't need to be perfect. It needs to be something people want.
I've been playing since day one and I've already lost interest. Most everyone I've spoken to is of the same thinking. It was fun at the beginning but there is simply not enough substance in the game to keep anyone interested for more than 2-3 weeks. There are only so many Doduos and Pidgeys you can catch before you are bored out of your mind.
I'm actually at level 23, and I'm trying to "catch them all" - or at least, all that are in my country. Once I do that, I'll probably just wait for more content. That way I'll be well positioned if new content comes out.
The game hasn't even been released in every country, and to be honest I don't think it should have been released at all (at least until the combat system was decent). However, they clearly have an extremely popular game. Even if 99% drop off, and only 50% return they will still be raking in the dough.
Well, I leave the game open at work and just spin the stops near me (there are three). Ive also walk an average of 20k steps per day since Pokemon Go came out.
I usually walk 15k steps, so it was a 30% increase.
I think what you and a lot of other people are talking about is burnout. People who are in the mid-20s levels have likely been playing quite a bit. Even if they started on day 1. But I think the game has a lot of longevity for more casual players.
Terribly true, and in some ways disheartening. Pokemon Go is successful because of the branding and I find it hard to imagine any independent developer achieving even a faint modicum of the same success within the same category (geo-AR games) for lack of that branding. Heck, even amongst established, popular brands which other ones could possibly have gotten the necessary critical mass off their butts and outside playing the game? Pokemon was sort of the perfect storm in that sense.
And that, to me, is a shame. I quite like the overall geo-AR concept. I live in a wholly uninteresting, mostly depressed (economically) area. Pokemon Go brings vibrancy and life to the surroundings, making it worthwhile to get outside and explore this new "world".
But when Pokemon Go dies, the city will go back to being what it always was underneath; a bland mixture of concrete, terrible food, and pay day loans. Will anything be able to pick up Pokemon Go's mantle? I have my doubts, and that's disheartening.
There's alot more that can be done. AR really feels like a chance to merge the real world with the digital finally. The indie developer would build on top of the platform that these new AR experiences create, not necessarily rebuilding these monoliths themselves (there should be no need). Once everyone is "living" in this AR world, we start all over again with new things that need to be made for it.
> building the right product trumps building a flawless product.
Y Combinator has been saying this for years, and I couldn't agree more. Niantic will iterate and fix problems, but Pokemon Go would have been doomed from the start if it wasn't what people wanted.
The people that were interested in Ingress wanted a game that involved geolocation. The people that are playing Pokemon Go wanted a Pokemon game that put Pokemon "in their world". Unfortunately, Niantic is currently giving PoGo players a reskinned Ingress.
Their ability to maintain a small community of players interested in a geolocation game, while notable, does not extend to their ability to maintain a massive community of players interested in a Pokemon game.
I enjoy the game, but I'm playing for the same reason I continued to play .hack//Infection after I beat it: I'm making small investments in its future potential. But I refuse to spend a dime on it in its current state - a game that has neither the trading experience, the combat depth, or the sense of community that even the original Red and Blue versions offered out of the box.
Dude, it's been like 2 weeks. The game isn't even rolled out globally yet. Give them a second or two before we start talking about how the game lacks longevity. If you're burned out from power-gaming 4+ hours a day trying to catch them all, well then that's really a personal issue. Just doing the basics of catching all the types of pokemon offers HUGE amounts of longevity for more casual players who don't burn themselves out.
I didn't say the game lacks longevity, nor did I say I was burned out, nor do I have the battery life to play it 4+ hours per day (because I don't feel the need to play, recharge, and play again).
This is one of few games that I am very casual about on the play side, mostly because I'm more enamored with what potential the API hacking community has to offer than I am with the game itself.
> The people that are playing Pokemon Go wanted a Pokemon game that put Pokemon "in their world"
No, they didn't. The people playing Pokemon Go did not know what Pokemon were until two weeks ago. They didn't "want" anything. Fanboys might have wanted this. But fanboys of a 90s television show do not make up a significant part of the population.
Where I live, the public parks are full of crowds of people and have Pokemon Go signs telling them that the park closes at 11pm and must leave. The rail stations have Pokemon Go signs warning travelers to pay attention when crossing the tracks. Business are throwing Pokemon Go-themed events to bring in customers. Bars are offering Pokemon Go themed drinks with discounts for players.
I was downtown when there was a four-hour outage of the servers. I saw on my server monitor that the login server came back online. I logged in immediately. From my location I could see about two dozen Pokemon stops. None of them had lures. Within five minutes, half of them had lures.
Only a handful of immature children on the internet care about the minor bugs and server issues. There will be no drop in interest any time soon.
So in a thread about how massively successful this game is, we are all predicting the inevitable doom? Why? Of course one day it will die out, but so will literally every other game. So far these things have not stood in the way.
In most of the world it is not even available, it will continue burning for a couple of months and if they add PvP, trading and other good stuff that the gameboy games had they will ensure indefinite success.
I think they'll be in trouble if a competitor makes an AR game based on a similarly popular IP that is more smoothed out. I'm not sure feasible that is in the near future, but it could happen.
The bugs and lack of features aren't going to be a big problem for some people because for them, it's as much a "meeting random people" app as it is a game. It's an ice breaker. Fighting over the gym with people from the neighborhood. Doesn't need to be complicated.
A month ago on my bike rides through a downtown park and along a river there were usually a decent group of people out enjoying the sunshine along the river, maybe 10% of them were using their phones. The other day I went through there and there were more (and younger) people out and virtually all of them were staring at their phones. Never seen anything like it in such a place.
