Pokémon GO: The Data Behind America’s Latest Obsession | Hacker News Reader

Pokémon GO: The Data Behind America’s Latest Obsession

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361 pointsnateberkopec339 comments

If Google had any sense, they would be throwing a tonne more at this. It may be Ingress with less features and a Pokemon skin but that latter part is exactly the mainstream appeal they need to make AR big. This is their big chance to create a new market. If they sort out the bugginess and roll out decent features in the next couple of months to keep retention, they're onto something big.

At near-on midnight on Saturday, there were 150-200 people sitting in a 70m stretch of the main public park area here in Brisbane CBD (Southbank). During Sunday when I walked through, that was closer to 250-300. This is purely because there's 3 or 4 points of interest in close proximity so people congregate there to interact with it. It's truly a sight to behold.

This game has captured the imagination of non-gamers better than anything I can think of in recent history. It's nearing WoW / CoD levels of ubiquity.

Does it ask you to login all the time too? My session gets expired very quickly.

From what I understand, it'll ask a new login if the servers crash between usage sessions of the app. I've not had to log in today, for example, but yesterday I had to two or so times. The login bug is relatively low-priority to me - all it does is force me to switch to the 2FA app and then untick the music in settings. Compared to other bugs, that's trivial.

I'm still occasionally seeing bugs with gyms - for example, instantly kicking me back to the gym screen as soon as I try to battle - but that's fixable by going and battling another gym. I've yet to see a way to solve the other big gym bug wherein enemies stay at 1hp but never die or do anything until the timer runs out.

Otherwise, the standard client/server sync bugs (pokeballs sitting on screen doing nothing if you lose server connectivity during capturing it) and client-side bugs (battery saver mode cuasing the game to become completely unresponsive to touch sometimes when you bring it back by turning your phone upright again) are the main gripes.

Google doesn't own Niantic anymore.

Ouch.

Google invested alongside Nintendo. It's highly likely they still own a significant portion of Niantic even if it's not an internal startup anymore.

The one thing which is missing (and which made Ingress the amazing game it is) is ingame notification and ingame player activity.

Based on the gym activity there are at least 15-20 players in my town but there is just no way of contacting them. If I am lucky I can manage to meet one by random chance but currently Pokemon Go is a rather single player game.

The other thing which is missing is a system which shows ingame player activity. At any given point I can open my scanner in Ingress and see exactly what's going on around me. I can see if there is a new player in town, I can see if my favorite enemy is active again, ... but in Pokemon Go I feel like I am blind.

I know that there are other Pokemon Go players out there in my town but I just can't see them or interact with them.

I watched five of my colleagues walk to Town Hall in Sydney's CBD and play the game the whole way... Remarkable!

This game is targeting young kids, so I'm not sure there will ever be any person-identifying interaction. A lot of online multiplayer games for kids don't have interactions beyond friending/favouriting someone. P-GO would be a prime candidate for 4chan type people and you can imagine how that would work together with location spoofing and global playground. I expect that Nintendo & Niantic know this (Ingress never solved the chat spamming issues - bots advertising resources for real money)

Yes, of course you are right about the safety of the kids.

I just wish there was an opt-in system where you can choose to share your ingame actions. If you don't share it you are invisible and you can't see other players, but if you are into Ingress-like gameplay you can just enable it.

About bots and cheating in Ingress: the biggest problem is that Niantic is a small company and they just don't have the manpower to sufficiently deal with the cheating. If they were Valve or Blizzard the situation would be a bit different.

I'm not sure I'm buying the small company angle. Sure, there are always going to be very creative people who work around complex rules, but that's not everyone. They could apply very basic checks and get rid of 99% of spam I've seen. Specifically, applying "you just moved more than 20km in one go and posted the same message including {bay/sell} => permaban".

For one moving 20km to Paste a message is easy and legal - using the Intel map. If you use the chat there it uses whatever location your focus is on. Also banning the "selling items" accounts does very little, they are cheap to recreate. The thing you have to control are farming bots.

> moving 20km to Paste a message is easy and legal

Anything you can do in Ingress apart from actually hacking the players' phones, or sending threats is legal. It doesn't mean it shouldn't be filtered. At some point more than half the lines in the chat were bots trying to sell stuff. Killing either part works - production (farming) or selling.

I'm not saying it's nice and that I support those sellers, but I'd try to kill the root ... and the chat experience always was limited with Ingress. In my local groups it was good enough however to get into contact with people to get then to hangouts or slack or whatever. With Pokemon this is really missing.

Perhaps it's just easier to leave it like the way it is? This way they can easily track spam-bots and the network behind it. If they start to implement more sophisticated by systems the spammers would also become more sophisticated.

At the point where you can't really talk to people anymore because your window is just flooded with spam, no. It may be easier for Nianic, but not for the players.

Besides, are you serious with that suggestion? Would you prefer email spam filtering didn't exist, otherwise it would get sophisticated? (easier to leave it that way viagra for sale now)

If the game is targeting young kids, it's missing out on its primary audience. For one thing, young kids often do not have cellphones of their own. But for another, I was recently at a mall in a fairly major city, and I did not see one person under 18 playing, but near every Pokestop, and every lower spawn rate Pokemon, I found dozens of people. Pokemon games have had somewhat adult humor and themes for years, though the TV show is undoubtedly meant for a younger audience. Given that most of the people who really wanted this game are people who grew up on Pokemon and are now adults, not at least providing the option to have social interaction feels a bit wrong. It could be abused, sure, but I think throwing the necessary resources at keeping it from being abused, and punishing abusers would be worth keeping the game relevant to its current primary consumer.

I believe the point is that if the target audience includes kids, you get stuck with the restrictions that implies, whether or not they are the majority. Some of this is directly legally mandated, some of it is indirectly legally mandated by fear of lawsuit, and some of it is mandated by avoiding bad PR about any bad thing maybe possibly happening to some kid somewhere because of your app. By that, I don't mean to minimize concerns about the real possibility of things that could be bad, but to highlight the fact that the PR disaster doesn't even need a real bad thing to happen, just a semi-credible accusation made to the right media for any reason.

None of those three concerns can be fixed by any amount of "resource investment" that will satisfy anyone. It would just get them accused of censorship anyhow.

Nintendo has always been very reluctant to include social features within games beyond a very difficult to use friend list, hell, they removed SwapNote from the 3DS because it young players were getting inappropriate notes sent to them. Frankly, I'm surprised they haven't binned Miiverse some days, but they do an excellent job at moderating it.

I wouldn't expect Ingress-style open comms, but it would be nice to at least be able to message other players on a friend list.

It's what Nintendo does. They very much view their products as kids toys.

AR done right inherently involves person-identifying interactions. All week almost everyone I know has made brand new real life friends while on their poké-travels. That's the draw here.

Apparently these already have the potential to be "honeypots" without seeing nearby players

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2016/07/10/four-suspects-...

Um. I played Ingress up to level 7, at which point I gave up. The geolocation features were excellent and I enjoyed exploring my city and finding interesting landmarks that I hadn't seen before --- but I found the actual game was extremely lackluster.

The problem as I saw it was that the game (as of a few years ago) rewarded taking territory, but not keeping it. So capturing a portal scores you points. But once you've captured it, there's no point keeping it any more. In fact, you want it to be recaptured as quickly as possible so that you can retake it and score more points. I found that I'd hardly ever use the higher-end defensive items because there wasn't any point --- defending portals wasn't worth anything.

This encouraged the behaviour where you'd capture a portal, and outfit it with the cheapest possible resonators. This made it trivial for the other time to capture it, and they'd do the same thing. And then you would recapture it. Repeat ad nauseam. This wasn't fun.

I don't know what the gameplay's like for Go; hopefully they didn't make the same mistake this time.

Edit: I've just discovered that Ingress also has the field formation mechanic, which is an end-game thing and grants team points. So you want to hold portals there to maintain big fields. So there is something --- I just never got involved in it (probably because it involved talking to other Ingress players)...

> I don't know what the gameplay's like for Go; hopefully they didn't make the same mistake this time.

The "capture" gameplay is only in gyms, every day you can collect a bonus/rent of 10 coins and 500 dust for each gym where you have a pokemon. Increasing the level of a gym increases its defensive power (so less chance for an other team to capture it) and the number of pokemon which can be stored in it (spreading the wealth amongst the team)

> The problem as I saw it was that the game (as of a few years ago) rewarded taking territory, but not keeping it

I suspect that was intentional design. Niantic was born out of the Google Maps division, and IIRC, the whole point of Ingress (at least initially) was to crowd-source generation and verification of geo data for GMaps. You could think of it as Waze for pedestrians/bikes. So gameplay that encourages constant conflict == constant data stream.

Walking around my neighborhood last night on two occasions at different times of the day, I encountered a dozen or more players both times: people of all ages out in the park or walking their dog. I live in an urban area half a block from a park with four Pokéstops in close proximity, but meeting/interacting with other players is not going to be a problem.

My small town has about 150 pokestops and only 10-20 players so we are spread pretty thin. The chances to meet someone are pretty slim.

I'm kind of on the fence here. I played Ingress quite a bit (and early), but what I disliked was that it seemed multiplayer only. There was very little (for me) return for being a solo player and most Ingress communication at that time happened in G+ (aka I wasn't part of that).

Pokemon Go is in some ways a limited Ingress, but the collecting/evolving/upgrading part of the game is what got to me.

I'd be glad about social features in the game. But I already think that this is a better game than Ingress for me personally.

If I am on my own then Pomemon Go is currently much more exciting than Ingress. But I miss i) you can not annoy opponents by blowing up their farms/homeportals, ii) make long bike tours in order to build large fields and iii) meeting with 8+ players and building a nice L8 farm, iv) being involved in continent-wide fielding operations with 100s of other players.

tldr: Pokemon Go is the better single player game, but if you are into large-scale and coordinated multi player games then Ingress is better.

The ingame player activity feature in Ingress turned out to have some really nasty privacy implications. I doubt they'd want to repeat it.

I think that's a very short-sighted judgement to say that the game is nearing anywhere close to the level of games like Wow and CoD, and sadly -- it will never get there.

There isn't very much flexibility that the game offers, and even it if will offer it in the future, the initial moon phase will be over by then.

It's a nice example of launching a product and getting people to use it, but within a few weeks Pokemon Go will be history, unless of course, people find more dead bodies or other surreal stuff while playing the game, though I wonder if that's the reputation that the developers are going for.

> the initial moon phase will be over by then

FYI: The statement should be the honeymoon phase, derived from the nothing-but-bliss albeit short-lived marital phase, rather than the lunar one.

Yeah, I feel like they set themselves up for a tough situation in a few weeks. Ingress was in beta and invite-only state for ages, which allowed the map to be built up and people to slowly join over time. People who joined later were still excited about low-level peers starting with them.

P-GO is likely to reach its peak in a few days... If some exciting content updates don't follow they may have a problem keeping people around. They'll definitely retain many fans (people still play the original handheld versions), but it will be interesting to see what happens in the future. Also, from own experience - it was easy to play Ingress and go on long walks initially. But after a while, you really want to spend time doing other things; past some point a 1h trip to do something specific for virtual points loses the appeal.

Pokemon Go reminds me of nothing so much as the Macarena in 1995. It's a fad that will run its course. But a game getting that level of cultural penetration will be a real watershed.

I speculate that Tetris (possibly even just the 1989 GameBoy version) was bigger than the Macarena.

Tetris wasn't that big before the Gameboy version. It was "big" in the tiny new computer/tech world, but it was gameboy which brought it into the mainstream.

The difference is that smartphones have a lot higher penetration than Gameboys did.

Yes, but that difference is mitigated by the fact that tetris was the first mobile videogame that was popular or even socially acceptable for the post-college crowd to play.

Now, the adult mobile gaming market is saturated.

It's going to easily pass WoW and CoD...if they get it working better fast enough. Actually, scratch that. At this point all they need to do is show an intense commitment to daily improvements. They don't need to solve everything immediately, they just need to convince people that they're making it better as fast as they can.

Pokemon Go has all the right elements at exactly the right time. It's going to be tremendous if they can keep up.

I think that highly depends on what they do. In its current form, you're probably right. If they add the right features, I think it could be big. What are those features? I'd speculate that the big one is letting people battle each other with the pokemon they've collected. Also, let them trade pokemon with one another and get them building teams. Give people a reason to interact with one another using the app, and they'll start talking to each other in these strange places they keep congregating.

> I'd speculate that the big one is letting people battle each other with the pokemon they've collected.

I haven't played Pokemon Go, but if you can't do this, what exactly are people doing in the game? Just collecting Pokemon and doing nothing with them? Honest question -- I had implicitly assumed being able to battle with collected Pokemon was the whole point.

Right now everyone's collecting and fighting in "gyms" with the assumption that fighting each other comes later.

It just feels like such an enormous misstep to me, I can't even fathom it.

Why not wait until the game was much more polished and had many more traditional Pokemon features before release?

Nobody will be playing this in a month unless Niantic are really really fast with the content updates. Like, one per week fast, until it's much more deep than it currently is.

> Why not wait until the game was much more polished and had many more traditional Pokemon features before release?

The game has all the G1 pokemon. I've had friends ask if it had "that modern garbage" before considering installing it, so having just G1 sounds like an excellent pick, it doesn't hinder younger people and recaptures the RGBY generation which didn't keep up with the series.

There's plenty of things to add and improve (including but not limited to the servers) and the rest of the international rollout to complete before there's any reason to expand to Gold and Silver.

The problem isn't a lack of Pokemon, it's a severe lack of polish. For example:

- Obviously the servers are slow, but the app freezes and crashes all the time too.

- The help text is unhelpful and leaves the user with a ton of questions as to what the buttons actually do.

- Little to no support for people in rural areas, as the Pokemon follow the XM patterns from Ingress.

- Buggy Pokemon catching (e.g. you have to throw super far to catch Zubat)

- No way to add friends, and very little community interaction (with the exception of gyms and lure modules).

- Can't rename character, change clothing, etc.

- The map on the Pokemon screen loads slower than everything else, so when you go to tap "Transfer" and the map loads it changes the layout and makes you click the app.

It feels more like a buggy beta of Farmville with geocaching than it does a Pokemon game. Pokemon Go is to the classic Pokemon games as Elder Scrolls Online is to the classic Elder Scrolls games -- tons of potential, but severely lacking in execution.

> - No way to add friends, and very little community interaction (with the exception of gyms and lure modules).

For what it's worth, here in New York City, the community interaction takes place IRL. There are literally hordes of people roaming the parks. Some people set out lures, and then sit on benches, striking up conversations with other players who walk over to try and catch some Pokemon.

I can't imagine how this game would work in rural areas, though.

Right. I feel like the game would have been so much better if it released with trainer battles (without a gym) and trading.

I think Pokemon has more to do with success of it than the AR stuff. I see most people playing without AR on. Pokemon appeals to the nostalgia factor. A lot of us grew with these games when we were kids. Now most of us older, but we still grew with them. It also hits the kids demo as well. Pokemon is/was a good game. Its like why marvel and transformers and all these 80s/90s cartoons are doing so well.

> I think Pokemon has more to do with success of it than the AR stuff. I see most people playing without AR on. Pokemon appeals to the nostalgia factor.

I think it's both. The game isn't great on it's own, and I bet the AR will feel tiring after a while like it did with Ingress. But this is amazingly close to the real-world idea of Pokemon so many of us have wanted since childhood.

Last night I went for a walk in the middle of the night to a nearby park. I encountered a few other "pokemon trainers" on the way (it's really obvious when someone is playing), and at the park were at least 30-40 other people, spread out in small groups, some hanging out in spots, some wandering around the grass tracking a Pokemon...

Seeing Pokemon in the real world is neat and all, but meeting lots of other "Pokemon Trainers"?! Wow, that really made me feel like a little kid again. I hope the population stays active until they add battling. It seems like it would be incredibly dull playing this game by yourself without running into others.

Ignoring the comparison with Twitter for a moment, this shows that Nintendo's mobile strategy has been woefully slow. They've been ignoring a huge market segment to try to shift hardware instead, and this toe in the water shows that a lot of people are interested in playing their games but not necessarily buying their consoles. I'd argue this means their business needs to change dramatically - away from their own hardware and towards leveraging their terrific IP on other platforms. Very much like Sega did a while ago.

Doesn't that depend on if they can make money on this model? This is a 126-year-old business, not a startup that's starving for "eyeballs" to increase their VC valuation. Selling hardware and $60 games could be a better (and more long-term) business than selling in-app "coins". (Or not!) I guess we'll see now.

I will never buy any in App Coin, but I have a lot of consoles + games from nintendo. Even the 'New 3DS'.

I used to live by the same principles, viewing in-app-purchases as something that's always bad. I have now, though, decided that I will decide what value a game has to me and will probably spend that amount on in-app-purchases. If the game has purchases that I think are worth it though. In Pokemon Go i haven't found them worth it yet, but that may come later.

Also, I think a game shouldn't impose too many boundaries when not buying anything in-game. So I won't buy off timers that essentially break the game (i.e. Candy Crush, though I never played that, so I might be wrong). I will, however pay for something to get that instant gratification of speeding up a timer that isn't game breaking.

I have come to see the same. I want to reward game creators for giving me enjoyable entertainment, and taking the risk by going free-to-play rather than forcing me into an up-front purchase.

I admit have become a bit jaded when it comes to gaming generally, but I still think it's worthwhile to speak with my wallet when I see someone doing something I think is good.

> Also, I think a game shouldn't impose too many boundaries when not buying anything in-game

This is the big problem the way I see it. Done badly, in game purchases become cheats, and I don't want to spend money on cheats.

Not for any moral reasons, but because it's no fun.

In game purchases that don't serve as cheats is another matter. E.g. as you mention speeding up something where the only difference would be that you'd have to wait longer to achieve the same.

I disagree, I'm all for buying cosmetics etc (praise gaben) to support a game. But I fundamentally am not going to spend money to skip over an artificial timesink that only exists to get you to spend money to speed it up. That's not content, it's a joke.

The idea of the two suggested actions being "spend more money or close the game and wait 2 hours" should be indicative of how they view the player. I'm perfectly happy to just close the thing and go play something else.

free to play, with no gameplay restrictions is an excellent model. when you can then do IAP to get "extras", it's a great "pay what you feel it is worth" type model.

another mobile game, Vainglory, does this with currency to unlock heros and skins. you can play the game to earn currency to get them, or just purchase outright.

Also works well in CS:GO. The skins add nothing to the actual game play, yet people like the value they add. Just a shame that it brings kids into a gambling state of mind. Would've been nicer if you could just buy them outright.

You can, it's an actual market. The price is just high, because the chance to get them is low. If you could buy them for what I assume you expect to be a lower amount, they would not sell nearly as many chests, or no one would want the item anymore because it's no longer rare.

> In Pokemon Go i haven't found them worth it yet, but that may come later.

It's not a requirement but I highly recommend to people to buy some "Lucky Eggs (2X XP for 30 minutes) and extra "Incense" (attract more Pokemon for 30 minutes) and use them together in the early game.

The reason why is that you get 2X the experience for discovering a new Pokemon which you will do a lot of early on. By doubling that further you save a ton of time in getting to a reasonably high level and collecting a lot of Pokemon quickly.

I'd also buy some "Egg Incubators". You get 1 for free and it has infinite uses. The ones you can buy get 3 uses before they "break". My advice is to use the infinite one on all eggs that will hatch after 2km of walking and use the breakable ones on 5km and 10km eggs. You get more use out of them this way. And eggs can hatch new Pokemon which benefit from the bonus described above.

For a few dollars you'll save many, many hours which to me at least makes the game more enjoyable.

also, save up a bunch of Pokemon ready to evolve (such as the ever plentiful Pidgey) and do them all at once with a Lucky Egg. 500 xp per evolution turns to 1000, making leveling pretty fast. The last few days I've been saving all of my stuff until the end of the day to evolve and easily pick up 12k+ xp

it's tempting to evolve everything as soon as you can, but waiting to do batch evolutions with double xp is much more effective

Good idea. I haven't evolved many of my Pokemon's yet. Just saving the dust and candy for when I want to evolve higher level captures I'll get later. Of course, at some point you need to figure out when it makes sense to just start evolving!

But, I'll certainly use this idea when that time comes!

Why bother playing the game at all if you're paying to skip it?

You're not. You're paying to play it more efficiently. I could spend 30 minutes collecting 8 Pokemon (lets say that gives you 3000XP) or I could use that same 30 minutes to collect 16 of them and double my XP on top of that (giving you 12,000XP). This lets me play the game faster. You aren't buying anything other than the ability to do more with less time.

The delays in these games are designed to make you pay to skip them. If it wasn't a free-to-play game, the delays wouldn't have been there in the first place. They're just there to make the game worse.

Exactly. So play games that don't use these abusive tactics, instead of rewarding them...

You don't have to buy anything and the experience is just fine. There is nor requirement to buy anything - the game leaves plenty to do. It's just the option is there if you want to go faster.

Also, it's a free game. If they charged $60, then I'd get your point. But the game is based on a "Freemium" model like tons of other software.

> You don't have to buy anything and the experience is just fine.

As implied by the earlier commenters, that's obviously not the case.

> It's just the option is there if you want to go faster.

It's only an "option" because they crippled the game in the first place.

> Also, it's a free game. If they charged $60, then I'd get your point. But the game is based on a "Freemium" model like tons of other software.

And thus, freemium is inherently abusive. But even then, there are more acceptable ways to do it.

For example, look at how Smite does this: free to download, you can pick between grinding/microtransactions to unlock each character individually, or pay $30 to unlock everything in one go and effectively go back to what the game should have been from the start. Cosmetics are still paywalled, but at least there are no more microtransactions that have any effect on gameplay.

I'm not against paying for games. I'm against constantly being hounded to pay for the same thing over and over again.

Pokemon Go has a really interesting mechanic for this - one of the in app purchases you can buy is for a 'Lure' that you can place in your physical area (in game) that attracts Pokemon for all people in the area.

So not only are you helping yourself, you're helping others around you. In our office, we take turns on placing them to help everyone out.

Something most people don't know either, you get 10 coins a day for each gym you have a Pokemon set up to defend (up to a maximum of 10 gyms) - giving you up to 100 free coins every day for just playing the game. And since you can't buy anything that you can't just get from a Pokestop either (and they are pretty common even in my suburban area, there's three on the ~15 minute walk to the convenience store down the street) there's little reason to spend money unless you are sitting in your house all day playing instead of actually walking around (which is by design).

Really, the biggest complaint I can see about the game from an IAP standpoint is rural areas get pretty hosed because Ingress (where all of the AR content came from) didn't have many portals in these areas, so there's a lack of gyms and pokestops to actually use for people living there. Hopefully Niantic makes some improvement here, because while Ingress was a game focused on urban exploration and it made sense for that title Pokemon is supposed to be a much more accessible franchise.

> And since you can't buy anything that you can't just get from a Pokestop either

Based on what I've read and my own experience (including a month as a beta tester), this isn't quite accurate. There are a few items that can't be harvested, including incubators, lures, lucky eggs, and backpack upgrades. Those can only be purchased.

Bah, you know what, you're right. Still, 100 coins a day from defending 10 gyms (not hard to do if you are in an urban area) is enough to pick up any item in the store (minus the storage upgrades), at least. Lures are really nice considering they benefit everyone in the area, so if you are nearby a group of players lure trading can be a pretty good deal.

Urban gyms are easier to defend? It seems to me the more people in an area the harder a gym is to defend, especially if you're early in your 21-hour cycle. I was in the last 20 minutes of my cycle today, and the gym at my suburban post office got taken from me about 5 times. The frustrating part is beating the gym and not getting one of mine in to defend it before someone else does.

Didn't mean they were easier to defend, but they are more prevalent. I live in the suburbs and there's only one gym within walking distance, so I'm limited in gyms I can even defend without traveling into the city center.

And not only are you helping others around you, it's also enhancing the social aspect of the game. I saw lots of lures at tourist sites in the city today, and people were naturally crowding around them to catch Pokemon - and talk to everyone else who had crowded there too.

One of the smarter ideas I've seen today - a local pub noticed they were getting increased traffic from players due to being close to both a gym and Pokestop. They mentioned in media interviews that they might permanently fund a lure in the Pokestop as a way to attract more players to the pub & offer them discounts on purchases if they mention the game. That sounds like a potential business model...

It's fascinating to see this game making such a cultural impact in a matter of days, with much more room to grow on both the social and business side of things. It has massive potential to double as a wallet not only for digital goods, but items that can be purchased in the physical world.

Could be, but in-app purchases often rely on very skewed spending behaviours. In other words, you alone may not be the best representative here, at least not with the 'whale' that is found for every 1000's of "you's".

why? do you also refuse to put quarters in arcade machines?

... not when I own the hardware :)

Not parent, but for me: Yes, I do. Arcade machines led to terribly designed games then, and running a game on purchases leads to terribly designed games now.

This is not to say that there can't be good free-to-play games with IAP, but the vast majority of the payment models is terrible in game quality (not talking about success). I honestly have a hard time coming up with a good example of an app, but in the PC space, excellent examples of quality free-to-play meets success is TF2 and Dota 2 where you can't buy an advantage yet they are hugely profitable.

I've spent at least 200 bucks on dota 2, and regret nothing. I have yet to spend any money on IAP in apps simply because I haven't seen any implementation I find acceptable.

maybe my childhood has given me an overly rosy view of arcades? :)

agreed theres plenty of bad implementations of iap, but i think with time people are figuring out how to do it well.

i must confess im not much of a gamer in adulthood, but eg i think space team and clash royale are both excellent apps w/ iap.

(as a side-note, most online advertising is much more aggravating to me than purchases!)

Funny you should mention it, but I've played a fair amount of Clash Royale as well (level 8 at upper arena 5). I still have a hard time recommending it though. It's such a great game in there, but I feel the IAP and the structure around it is what plagues it.

Pacing it to gouge money to unlock chests, no max levels on cards (especially in tournaments), selling epics and chests etc.

I wish there was or I could come up with better ways to monetize it other than hats, but the game could be SO much better, and I would feel good about sinking money into it. The only thing that would happen, were I to put money into it, is that I would maybe bump up an arena or two earlier than otherwise, but then I would be in the exact same spot there instead. There's no end to the gouging, where gouging != possibility to put in more money.

Didn't arcades pretty much die out once powerful game machines people could play as long as they wanted to for free became affordable?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Nintendo is not the creator of the Pokemon Go game. Niantic (spelling?) licenses the Pokemon brand from Nintendo.

So in this case the comparison is not between selling in-app coins vs games. It's between licensing IP to the company that sells coins, vs selling games.

Technically Nintendo is not even the full owner of Pokemon, that would be The Pokemon Company [1], which is only partially owned by Nintendo

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pokémon_Company

Yet Nintendo market cap gained 7 billion on Pokemon Go alone. I wonder if these investors really have no idea that the tech behind the game is Niantic and that Pokemon isn't even completely owned by Nintendo, or that there's something I'm missing here.

The tech is the least important part of this whole thing.

It's not successful because it's particularly innovative or a fancy piece of tech, it's a success because it's pokemon.

Yet I've seen a lot of comments of people who really enjoy the augmented reality part of it, which was inherited largely from Ingress. Sure, the Pokemon IP is a huge part of the reason it took off. But the reason people actually like it is much bigger than that.

Yes except almost nobody plays Ingress and this game hasn't been out a month and it's about to pass Twitter in popularity...

Pokemon popularity != Twitter popularity.

You wouldn't go around comparing the popularity of Doom to Facebook right? This comparison needs to disappear.

Facebook is obviously more popular than Doom, but the article is comparing two Android apps which is a fair comparison

We are comparing popularity of things people waste time on. In my eyes, they are all the same. It's the past-time market.

Because of how people, including myself, are using the game I think comparison to social networks is more than fair. I have never seen more people out downtown wandering around and talking to strangers.

I'd love to see where you get your numbers from considering Niantic doesn't publish active player stats for Ingress.

well it's purely anecdotal I'll say but everyone I know is playing Pokémon Go right now and before only my really really "nerdy" friends played Ingress.

if Ingress were anywhere near as popular their servers would have been down constantly and we would have heard about it being so popular...

I take it you've never played Ingress before? Because they've had outages before, particularly during some of the larger events.

Just because something doesn't get widespread news doesn't mean it's unpopular. Sure, Go is massively popular in its own right and to scale beats out Ingress but it's not like Ingress was some 2-bit game that nobody played. Half the mechanics of Go came from there, if Ingress sucked and was a failure they a) wouldn't have put the same features in Go, and b) probably wouldn't have even made Go.

tl;dr Please stop shitting on something you have zero experience with.

Look I'm not shitting on it. It's not orthogonal that you both saw large numbers of people playing it and that it wasn't as popular as Pokémon Go. I'm not saying it's a technological failure, I'm saying it didn't capture as many people's attention in the same way that Go did.

Strange, 'cause most of the tips online say to turn off the AR stuff since it makes it more difficult to catch Pokemon.

I don't use it at all anymore.

AR != Just the camera. It's the geolocation of stuff. The camera part is just a gimmick and pretty annoying.

The camera part may seem gimmicky and getting in the way of gameplay, but you can't deny it's a large part of the virality of the game - people posting photos of Pokemon sitting on toilets, park rangers posing with Pokemon with a joke about wildlife - it's marketing genius.

Why is that weird? Investors just got proof that there's a lot of new untapped potential in the Pokemon brand.

Pokemon Go is magnitudes larger than Ingress, their previous project, even though it's been plagued with more issues than Ingress and is arguably not as fully featured.

The difference?

Pokemon, which Nintendo owns.

If I was an investor, I'd view the potential for licensing the Nintendo IP (something Nintendo has been extremely reluctant to do in the past) as a huge potential growth vector for a struggling market segment (consoles, specifically Nintendo-made ones.)

True. Nintendo, of course, has a lot more IP than just Pokemon that they could license for all kinds of stuff. And the people who grew up with their games are now earning money, so they can actually buy the licensed material. Good point.

They could be like Marvel. Tons of characters and story lines to license for film and games.

Marvel licensed their IP out to Marvel Puzzle Quest (which was somewhat of a Bejeweled clone) and was quite successful with it. They didn't have a huge studio behind it either.

I considered buying the stock, for the reason that maybe this means (1) Nintendo has quietly shifted their strategy to include mobile and other platforms or (2) seeing this mobile money will finally convince Nintends that they can make a ton more with additional mobile titles.

Either way, I expect Nintendo will finall be releasing more mobile games. I suspect investors think the same thing, leading to the $7b increase.

"Quietly shifting their strategy" - they've been very public about a partnership with DeNA since at least March of last year. Given their success with micropayments in 3DS and similar titles, I've got high hopes for Miitomo/Go/etc.

Nintendo has never been about the tech. Not the NES, not when Sega released the Genesis while they pushed SMB3 for their "wimpy" 8-bit system, not when they crushed both Sony ans MS with the underpowered original Wii and not now.

Sony will live or die based on their ability to make great tech. Nintendo is different.

I wouldn't say they crushed Sony and MS. They sold a lot of Wiis but not a lot of games per console.

That's true. (for those who don't know, Niantic is the Google spinoff also responsible for Ingress).

I believe the app is a collaboration between Niantic and TPC, rather then just a straight licensing. Niantic has the AR-game expertise and has very clearly learned a lot of good lessons from running Ingress for three (4?) years now, while the Pokemon Company obviously knows a lot about making a good Pokemon game and probably had a lot of creative input.

Nintendo became an investor in Niantic in October of 2015

There's little reason why they are dependent on only in-app coins. They could easily sell "advertising" by placing regionally rare items in real business space.

This would be one of the worst possible outcomes of Nintendo dipping their toes into the mobile game category. Nintendo doesn't need to bootstrap, they don't need to mine user data, they are brimming with IP and are backed by a lot of creative people.

My hope is after this initial success they start adding in paid apps that tie into improve their existing games. Something like exploring the real world for Pokemon allows them or the items they carry to be transferred to the 3DS version.

If something like that is successful full development of uniquely mobile games that are actually worth paying for and don't require the app to be full of ads, cheat to win paid upgrades, or completely unnecessary waiting periods between levels. The best outcome for the mobile gaming industry would be the fall of in-app purchasing in favor of outright buying fun well made games.

Nintendo's IP is strong enough to lead this charge with the right business strategy.

Read the parent post again, they aren't suggesting that they put ads on the screen of your phone.

Exactly. The rare item placement could be sold to the highest bidder, without any actual advertising in game. It's everything foursquare tried to do -- drive foot traffic.

Can you imagine driving down the road, your family is starving, you just want something quick to eat. You ask your kids what they want to eat, and they say Burger King, because that's where mew is that week? Kids have a lot of control on this stuff, and the retail space knows it.

In addition, they can also tap into mellineals who grew up on Pokémon.

Pokemon Go is currently the top grossing app on the App Store. More than all the hugely advertised games like Clash of Clans and Mobile Strike.

>Very much like Sega did a while ago.

Yes, but hopefully without a massive dip in quality of established properties. Although the writing was on the wall for that one, I suppose.

I don't think it's their hardware, but their platform that they've been clinging to. Owning the platform gives gives them a lot of control over the gameplay experience.

I don't think they need to give up their platform-owner (or first party in game industry parlance) status in order to take advantage of the mobile space. Just an adjustment in strategy.

Nintendo has always relied on ancillary hardware to make their console platform work - TVs. If you think of Apple and Samsung as the screen makers the same way that Zenith and RCA were the screen makers when the NES launched, then you can see that what Nintendo really needs to do is launch their own platform app.

How much would a gamer pay for the Nintendo NX app? $50? $100? All of the games could come via in-app purchases and loaded or streamed from the cloud at the user's convenience. Meanwhile, Nintendo still gets their platform, but this time as a virtual console instead of a hardware one.

> How much would a gamer pay for the Nintendo NX app? $50? $100?

I doubt most users would pay anything at all. It's essentially just an app-store in an app-store. How much would you pay to download Steam?

But keeping all their content inside a Nintendo NX app would be a great idea. When I went to download Pokemon GO, I wasn't sure which was the correct app, there were tons with similar names, and the top one was by "Niantic", when I was expecting to see Nintendo. You're never really sure these days if an app will be good, or sometimes even if you're downloading the right one. But people trust the closed Nintendo ecosystem, or at least I do, I feel I could pick any game at random in one of their major IP's, and it would be at least an 8/10.

Except now it's not available on iOS.

oh and playing Zelda, Mario, hell even a real pokemon game, on a touchscreen sounds awful.

>oh and playing Zelda, Mario, hell even a real pokemon game, on a touchscreen sounds awful

I completely agree with this. But it's easily solvable - just make a controller. You buy the app on the platform, play a limited selection of games with the touch screen, and when you're ready to upgrade, you go buy a controller at your preferred retailer.

Nintendo is successful despite Nintendo in some cases. There are so many missed opportunities with them. For example, first DS and Wii had a technical capability to talk to each other. They even announced it as one of the key points before launching either. It never happened. They could've had Pokemon GO on that platform already if they chose to.

Part of that is because mobile gaming largely sucks, and Nintendo doesn't want to be associated with something that sucks. So their entry into mobile is much more cautious and calculated, intended to present the kind of experience Nintendo is known for rather than the usual sort of IAP money farm that is commonplace in mobile gaming.

The approach of Sega, Capcom, and Konami was to pivot from traditional games into money farms, and that sowed a lot of ill will among their fans.

Try playing Sonic Runners. It's sort of okay for a while, then it hits the wall of "spend money or be forever in grindy hell". It's like a stripper who's very friendly with you for 30 seconds, then starts asking for money to keep being friendly.

If Nintendo did that, it would take a power dump all over their brand. So they're playing it safe and taking a more measured approach to mobile.

Nintendo could sell a $60 mobile game, no IAP. Problem solved.

The main problem with IAPs is when it becomes pay-to-win, whereas a free game with aesthetic IAPs is better appreciated. For example, DotA2 has worked for Valve (though it has an extremely toxic community and way too many scammers, but that seems easier to manage on mobile).

Unless it comes with a Bluetooth controller and somehow works without appreciable input lag, no sale. A touchscreen alone is just not an adequate gaming input device for any but very simple games. That's why Nintendo still makes consoles.

I don't understand why people keep pushing this.

The WiiU is a flop, but the Wii sold massively.

On the mobile side, they probably want to try to avoid cannibalizing their portable hardware sales. They own that space and have sold 60+ million 3ds, and 150+ million DS family units.

From the genesis Sega went through the 32x (665k), sega cd (2.25 million), bailed on the neptune, saturn (9m), and the dreamcast (9m).

The amazing thing to me is that, at least on iOS, the game is pretty objectively bad.

Of course that hasn't stopped me from sinking a lot of time into it this weekend. I've spent $10 on it, which is easily a record for free to play game for me.

The server issues are one thing, but the game doesn't even get lots of basic things right. If the server goes away, or sometimes if I'm just out of the app too long, I have to log back in. It seems to forget my settings for weather I want sound and music on, or to use the AR functions. I've run into numerous crashes and graphical glitches. Input getting confused requiring app restarts. Poor handling of the (common) network/server issues.

One of the mechanics requires walking around, which it won't track outside the app despite the fact that iPhones have had motion coprocessor for years. So they offer a special mode (very poorly documented) that basically turns the screen black and tries to reduce power usage a bit. But you have to keep the Pokémon app open to track steps.

I am having fun. I REALLY hope they can fix these issues. I sought earlier today that they do plan to add Pokémon trading and expand the functionality of the various waypoints in the world. I'd also love to be able to battle my friends.

The social aspect on this just amazes me. In the last couple of days they're been numerous times when I saw a random people clearly playing this game. Guys walking around parking lots at work, cars parked at empty banks that were closed because there happened to be a gym there. Numerous posts on social media about random gatherings and flash mobs because of something going on in the game.

It's clear that Ingress had a pretty good idea. Tying it to a major brand (not unlike the way Mario kart was created) that really encourages the collecting aspect and getting it out on iOS at basically the same time have clearly made a huge difference.

I'll also say, is a Pokémon fan I'm glad that it's only the 150 original in the game. At this point there are way too many Pokémon that seem the same to me, so I'm glad to see my old friends instead. I imagine that'll change someday but this is a good start.

It's bad because it can be. Mobile apps are easily updated, so they don't feel the need to do as much testing. There's no way an actual Pokemon release would be that buggy, because they couldn't fix bugs later.

This game has been in Beta for several months, with several long standing issues not being fixed. Plus the game is built off a 5+ year old engine. If that's not enough testing, I don't know what is.

Also the 3DS has patching/software updates. The Pokemon Company could release games as buggy as they want. They have the good sense not to do that, since it devalues their product.

I know that's an excuse that lots of developer seem to use these days.

It's fucking bullshit.

I'm so tired of people releasing utter crap and claiming it's OK to fix it later. You know what happens when you do that? You turn off a huge number of people and poison the brand.

It's not like if they waited an extra months to actually fix the issues (which were apparently well known in Beta) the Pokémon brand would've been dead no one would've cared. This isn't tied to some new property that no one knows if it will succeed.

This is tarnishing a major brand and ruining a fantastic opportunity.

All because a bunch of developers don't care enough about what they're making. They don't have enough pride in their products because "people will buy crap, we can fix it later."

You sir are 100% correct. Glad you made this comment. It's all about the first impression.

>I'm so tired of people releasing utter crap and claiming it's OK to fix it later. You know what happens when you do that?

Apparently what happens is your app becomes one of the most downloaded in history.

The truth is, those "lazy developers" are right. They can release utter crap and fix it later. People will put up with it simply because of their emotional investment in the brand, and it will make money regardless of its issues.

> The truth is, those "lazy developers" are right.

I don't understand why this discussion is about the developers. Do you think Tim, who writes network code for the iOS version, gets to say when they launch?

No. Some top dog at Niantic says "We're launching early to catch the summer buzz while kids are out of school." And Tim says "But we don't handle network disconnects gracefully yet." And top-dog man says "Can you still catch Pokemon and battle at gyms?" And Tim admits, "Yes, you can." And top-dog says: "We launch tomorrow, then."

Surely they can release and fix later because Nintendo (or whoever?) built up the Pokémon brand over time. They've built consumer trust but they can easily destroy that do the point that such moves will fail in the future.

I think the game would have to be unplayable for Niantic to really destroy their credibility, and it doesn't seem to be. Consumers have been trained by now to expect a poor initial offering from AAA publishers that might improve over time.

> Don't care enough

I wouldn't blame this too much on laziness but on incompetence.

To be fair, mostly anybody would hit server issues hitting Twitter/tinder-like scales in 3 days. It's impressive that they're staying up as well as they are

It's not just the server issues, it's that the app logic is terrible. When you hit a Pokemon with your Pokeball, if there is a network error, the app just freezes. The ball drifts to the ground without blinking, and the loading indicator appears periodically, but it never progresses past that point. It just flat out cannot recover from dropping packets, no matter how long you wait. And it's not like the network is down; if you kill the app and reopen it, it is able to load the information it needs.

In many places, this happens with at least 50% probability on a mobile connection. It literally fails more often than not. The advice people are giving is to turn off LTE, which seems to help for some reason. But come on.

Yep, the hitting-with-Pokeball into a freeze is by FAR the most frustrating thing ever. But at least you successfully catch a decent amount of the time >.>

Have to kill and relaunch the app, and the app launches really slowly. it feels like the initial loading bar is also reliant of their servers, as I've had it take upwards of 30 seconds, or a few times even hang indefinitely.

Once you get in it'll still have to download locations of nearby pokestops and gyms, which is another chance to hang and require a relaunch. Network glitches are not handled gracefully.

On the hang while catching a Pokemon: my guess is it's trying to ask the server if the Pokemon breaks free of the ball. Sometimes when you exit and relaunch you'll have gotten the Pokemon, other times it's totally gone. When the game works properly you get to keep trying, but if it locked up on network issues and made you quit, you don't get the chance. People are understandably annoyed at server issues screwing them out of rare captures.

You know it's bad because the previous incarnation, Ingress, had no where near as many players.

Ingress ultimately hard more complicated gameplay and less brand appeal

It's too bad in a way, Pokemon Go is a way better idea, Ingress always felt like some cool ideas thrown together in search of a unifying theme. It is the only AR game with any real lasting appeal that I'm aware of, until perhaps Pokemon Go, but a lot of the choices made in building Ingress are less than ideal for Pokemon, and yet they form its foundation. I was never really clear what kept Niantic afloat, I always figured they were nothing more than a cost center at Google. Perhaps Pokemon will have enough success to prompt them to evolve the gameplay, and fix some of the common bugs with Ingress.

I thought the purpose of Ingress was to crowdsource location data and photographs of points of interest for Google Maps.

A common speculation, but I can't fathom how much value this adds to Google Maps, if any, what with street view and other 360 degree content they have at their disposal. I suppose that the crowd-sourcing aspect of it could serve to identify small sites of interest off the beaten path? Again though, what possible value does this provide to Google maps? Plus, a lot of the sites are already well known locations (churches) or are bunk (the "big red ball" out front of a local target)

Ingress also had an invite-only launch, which meant that by the time lots of people got into the game, the portals were all super high level and playing the game was difficult.

Pokemon Go is already showing signs of the same problem at Gyms, where newer players are going to have to grind for days to take on a gym that their team doesn't already own.

Yeah I can see that. It would be good to be able to build your own gym up, so you could place a gym at your house after acquiring some kind of resource, and people could try and take you down.

It would help to add to the density of the map in less populated areas, though that might make the trespassing issue a lot worse.

Please submit this as a support request - this seems to be the only way to get Niantic to see anything as they don't seem to use Twitter, Facebook or HackerNews.

Wasn't high level portals a good thing for ingress? It made the social aspect more important. New players would meet experienced ones and quickly level up.

Speaking as someone who has helped develop two extremely successful mobile games "objective" goodness is pretty meaningless. People have more patience than you expect for a game that captures their imagination and will put up with buggyness. In the long run, if a game isn't polished it will lose because of retention. But pure technical polish is often overrated.

I can put up with a fair amount. There are some Z-buffering issues that don't really matter. I've seen occasional glitches with the way the background works in AR.

But how can you not remember if I've me that the sound? How can you not remember I logged in? With a handful of ultrabasic bugs it feels like they just didn't even try.

If they are network issues why do I get stuck in a try again later screen were the only thing I can do is force quit the app?

It's a lazy as hell and Nintendo should be ashamed that someone's dragging their name down like that.

I completely agree with this. The network issues, and the lack of tolerance for GPS issues would be frustrating but acceptable if they were handled properly. As it is they're absolutely infuriating when combined with the way the app just dies when it encounters them. It's incredible that an app that's been in beta for months still has 20 un-recoverable different freeze states that I've found in 72 hours. My girlfriend didn't even know how to kill an Android app before this app, now she can do it in seconds.

The real killer? I love the idea of this app. I'd probably end up spending a bunch of money on it if I kept it around for a couple months, because I don't have the time I need to play it the free way. It's fun (or it at least scratches that grindy type itch), and it's the only game I've ever been able to play with my partner. I'm on the verge of uninstalling right now though, because every time I get the chance to play, the app dies in my hands.

There is NO graceful handling of loss of network connection at all. Many times I've been out throwing Pokeballs at a Pidgy, then my phone catches the nearby Starbucks wifi and switches over. In the brief period of no connectivity during the switch, the game loses connection, and just... dies. All actions stop. The animations keep playing on loop, but it's impossible to throw another pokeball, impossible to leave the minigame, etc.

This doesn't just happen when in "catch a pokemon" minigame mode. This happens at all screens. The game was programming to expect full, 100% network connectivity, and if it loses that for even a brief moment, the whole thing comes crashing down, requiring a full kill and reset.

> I'd probably end up spending a bunch of money on it if I kept it around for a couple months, because I don't have the time I need to play it the free way.

Can someone explain this? Isn't the value of a game in the playing of it? If a millionaire could pay to have hundreds of Pokemons spawning in their living room so they can get more points than anyone without leaving the house, what would be the point? If you're having fun playing with your girlfriend, but don't have much free time, why would paying to catch up matter? Did they design it to be limited gameplay, where you only get a teaser if you don't play it all the time, requiring that you buy things in order to get any real gameplay time out of it?

your comment is gold

to it I'd add that this is also the difference between the $20/hour programmer and the $200/hour programmer -- speaking in broad strokes, knowingly, and if you'll indulge me charitably. Because the difference between the commodity "let's ship something!" programmer/engineer and the one who truly knows his/her stuff, and who truly thinks about and knows about and cares about the edge cases, the big picture, the total system, all possible states in the state machine space, is what justifies those differences in (ostensible) upfront cost.

If you only want "the user is in location X and so icon Y should be rendered on their screen at point P" then you can get that pretty cheap, at globalization-plus-crowdsourced-plus-cloud-reduced prices

But if you want that above but also, with good performance, correctness, stability, scale, all edge cases handled reasonably and gracefully, and in v1.0, and well documented, and with good English, and maturity, curtesy, legality, i18n, etc... well, then you're going to pay. Or you should expect to pay. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Ever. If you think you have a free lunch, or a reduced cost lunch, then all it means is that somebody else off-stage is paying for that difference. And that difference may come back to bite you.

> to it I'd add that this is also the difference between the $20/hour programmer and the $200/hour programmer

You could have a hundred "$200/hour programmers" on the team for this app, but if management says they need to ship three weeks early to catch the buzz, or something like that, it doesn't matter. We can't say the developers were bad. I mean it's possible, given how poorly the game handles network disconnections, among other bugs. But unfortunately we don't live in a utopia where the guys writing the code get to decide when they want to release. Or if features get added in the last minute. Etc.

so many HN replies say 'you're wrong and you implied <what-you-didn't> therefore should feel bad'. yet this did not. well said, agreed. you added signal.

in many situations, an owner/manager/lead is making decisions where, frankly, the company has no revenue so they know their ostensible default spending path is equivalent to a ticking time bomb.

or... they don't truly know whether or how well the engineer can deliver, yet they do know for sure definitively what their dollar spend will be. thus, the results we see.

We totally do get to say that in this case. This game inherits issues that have been present in Ingress for years. Years! Ingress gets away with it most of the time because it's not operating in a worst-case scenario where the backend has to suddenly scale from limited beta to millions of active users, so fewer of these bugs present. The actual architecture work underneath is poor; client code should not crash, softlock, or lose frames because of a temporary connectivity issue.

But TBH, that is probably not about how much the engineering team is paid, it's about what culture they have. Nintendo's console development teams would never ship something with this many catastophic bugs. Niantic has probably decided that the way they're doing things is "industry standard" (within the context of mobile and their particular silo) and does not need substantial improvement.

Edit: How poor is this code, you ask? It does not let me rename my Pokemon. A race condition occurs where it tries to pop up the Android keyboard and close it at the same time.

Agree, just look at DayZ. Players stuck with that through extreme buggyness. Sure it might not have the same number of players as it once did but there were periods during which players were putting up with a lot of bugs.

Because we're believers! And there's no subscription cost and we've already paid, and all our friends play it too, I guess...

I don't really 'get' DayZ, but I also know that it was a pay-once game, not free to play. Once you've paid the money you might as well get your fun out of it. But if you're constantly losing items and getting frustrated by bugs what's the incentive to keep playing and possibly giving Niantic money?

If you look at Imgur for example you'll see two observations by users: 1) It's amazing and 2) They have server issues. Notice that #2 is incredibly vague and almost hand-waved as a joke. We as developers see the minor flaws but most people just seem to see the good of it.

EDIT: I'm not talking about Imgur. I'm talking about Imgur's posts about Pokemon Go. My bad for the ambiguity.

I've used Imgur for years (though not wittingly anymore, due to their growingly shady practices) and have never known them to have a reputation for poor uptime. Reddit's stability issues seemed to be 100x worse.

When I think of Imgur, I think of 1) first 'decent' image host in a dark time, 2) terrible policies/management.

You mean "decent" as in "can't even show a plain image file without javascript"? Puh-lease.

I mean "decent" as in "It was better than the other options at the time" - Photobucket, etc.

I've had issues where I definitely successfully capture a pokemon, but either lose connection due to being underground on transit or the servers 'crashing', so I wind up not having the pokemon saved to my record. Makes me think they aren't doing much, or any, local caching.

It's happened a few times that after catching a pokemon the pokeball just lays there and I can't click on it to register

Don't think it'd be solved by local caching. All that logic should be remote anyway. The local client shouldn't decide if a Pokemon was caught or not, the server should.

What the client should be doing is gracefully reconnecting and picking up at the state it left off in... which it certainly is NOT doing right now.

If you eliminate all the server issues, the game isn't "objectively bad".

In fact, I quite enjoy it. It's a little simple for the first few levels, but that's how Pokemon games have always been!

Once you level up your character, you'll start getting harder Pokemon to catch and you can start trying to take and hold gyms. And you'll get enough candies to start upgrading and evolving your Pokemon as well.

To put it plainly, this is the first mobile game in years to get me really excited about getting out there and doing things. Ingress was okay for a while, but never amazing. Zombies Run! had issues that I never got over, and I just quit... And it wasn't really compelling anyhow.

But this? My wife and I repaired the tires on our bikes after years of saying we'd do that, and we've been on multiple bike rides already. I'm quite looking forward to continuing that trend, and without the Pokemon aspect, I know it wouldn't happen as often, if at all.

So no, it's not "objectively bad". It's quite clearly compelling and enjoyable for a lot of people, just maybe not for you. And that's perfectly okay on all accounts.

Agreed, I like the simplicity of the game. I've tried ingress a few times and I didn't have patience going through the wall of text to understand the game. Pokemon has a lower barrier.

For those who don't want to invest too much time, they can occasionally boot up the app when they walk around and catch a few pokemon. Those who are more hardcore will probably stick around at gyms and battle away.

But there's no depth to the game. Yes it has a very low learning curve, but there's really very little progression. Even casual players get sick of a game that doesn't progress. At least candy crush gets a bit harder and introduces new mechanics.

How can I try to hold a gym? I can't interact with the players from "my" team and I don't get attack notifications to be able to react. So suddenly my gym switched color which I can actively check after the fact. In good old Ingress I got an attack notification and (remote) recharge or (locally) refill with resonators or emergency switch it using a virus, thus prevent the attack. I reached Level 14 in Go and uninstalled it. Will probably try in a few versions, again. But for now this wasn't much fun.

"the game is pretty objectively bad. ...I am having fun."

Doesn't that mean the game is good? Lots of people enjoy Uno, not every game can be Go (nor should it). If you're having fun, you're doing it right.

I think people will look back on this game as important, as something special. I've been playing video games for over twenty years, and I can't remember the last time something felt quite as exciting as this. Each time I've gone out, I've seen other people walking around playing, and everyone gets the same goofy smile when you ask them if they're playing Pokemon too.

It shows the potential for AR games, and I think it will help a lot of people get in shape. I've walked around outside more in the past three days than I have in the past two months. Even hanging out with friends, rather than sitting inside watching tv or playing xbox, it's like "let's check out that lure", or, "I see a Bulbasaur, let's go get it".

When I was a kid, I remember wishing that Pokemon was real. This game really captures some of the magic and sense of adventure I felt when I first played it so many years ago.

Ingress was as exciting as this. And it was a lot of fun running into other players (friendly and enemy) and spotting them from a few dozen yards away. I still regularly talk to people I met on the Ingress scene, including one enemy player who was, at the time, my "archnemesis" of sorts. I did meetups with other local players to takeover large areas as a group and stuff as well.

But yeah, version 2 is cool too, I guess. ;)

Like Ingress, it'll be pretty busy for a few months and then it'll probably recede back to a core community of people who really really get into it.

No doubt Ingress was exciting, but it was a new AR/VR concept and an original sci-fi plot, putting it in the same ballpark demographic as a AAA video game.

Pokemon GO has the advantage of being based on an multi-billion dollar, 20-year-old franchise. Its appeal goes beyond that of a typical videogame, so has a significant leg up over Ingress in people's hearts and minds. Its popularity will eventually segment into a hardcore group and a mainstream group, but its mindshare among the wider population is likely to remain strong.

One of the big problems with Ingress was it wasn't available on iOS until maybe a year ago.

Since Google made it I don't exactly blame them, but that was a huge chunk of the market. I wanted to give it a try and I'm sure there were tons of other people but we couldn't since we didn't have Android phones.

That's not an issue with Pokémon GO.

Ingress on iOS was 7 months after Android.

Closed beta - November 15, 2012

Open beta - October 30, 2013

General Android Release - December 14, 2013

iOS Release - July 14, 2014

Really?

Huh, I only heard about it last year.

A lot of people's lives have Pokemon deeply ingrained in them, and I'm saying that seriously. I think the core community of people who really get into it is much larger than you seem to be expecting. Remember the Pokemon craze of the 90's, and 00's, and this decade? It's all been huge since it came out.

I'm only vaguely familiar with ingress, did it have a collecting mechanic like Pokémon? How did you get stronger to take over points on the map?

It definitely didn't have a "catch them all" mechanic, and that alone lets Pokémon Go have much more of a feeling of personal progress.

In Ingress, everything is about taking over portals for your team. You get items with weird names that you use for taking over portals. The maximum strength of the items you get is determined by your experience level, up to 8. After level 8 all players are equal.

What Ingress has that Pokemon Go doesn't have is "linking", where you form straight lines between portals your team owns that you've visited, and if you form a triangle of links in your color, you form a "field" that claims the area within it for your team.

That was cool, but I have made enough links and fields for a lifetime. Eventually there isn't much more to do, unless you're teaming up and making elaborate plans to form crazy huge fields, for which the reward is that you get to screenshot it and gloat about it on Reddit for a few hours before someone undoes your field, possibly by cheating.

I hope that Pokemon battles become as compelling as linking, or more. (I have only had one Pokemon battle that didn't crash or glitch out so far.)

> that alone lets Pokémon Go have much more of a feeling of personal progress.

In addition to the levelling-up aspect (L1-L16) Ingress has about a dozen "Medals", each with 5-tiers. IMO, they go along way in terms of giving a feeling of personal progress.

> In Ingress, everything is about taking over portals for your team.

There are also infrequent Niantic-organized global 'Anomaly' events, which require a surprising amount of planning and coordination. To me, the reward is not taking a screenshot, but taking part in an activity that scratches that deeply human/primal "my group vs. its enemies" itch in my lizard brain in a safe way. Its like being on any kind of team really. On a meta level, it scares be how easily members of the other team get dehumanized (being called stupid, or having more money than sense, etc for no real reason). It's petty stuff mostly, but the whole in-group/out-group thing freaks me out a little.

You know, if someone wanted to generate training sets for human social behavior under a given variety of conditions, I bet a game like Ingress would be a great way to go about it. But you'd need a much larger install base, over a broader range of people, to get really worthwhile data.

Aren't the medals the same thing in Pokemon Go (i.e. no differentiation between them)?

So, the game claims that I walked a bit more than 40km so far and I'm going for the next (100km..) level of that medal. As soon as I reach 200 caught normal type Pokemon (at ~150 now?) I get the next 'Schoolkid' level.

Was/is Ingress different?

As I stated elsewhere, for me it's Ingress vs. Pokemon Go is currently Multiplayer vs. Singleplayer, Community vs. Progression

> So, the game claims that I walked a bit more than 40km so far and I'm going for the next (100km..) level of that medal. As soon as I reach 200 caught normal type Pokemon (at ~150 now?) I get the next 'Schoolkid' level. Was/is Ingress different?

Ingress is similar - those are the tiers I was referring to. The only difference is Ingress medals are purely decorative: they don't affect gameplay. I haven't played Pokemon, but it sounds like a refinement of ideas present in Ingress.

I have played Ingress and it's definitely fun. I could never bring myself to care about the story though. I'd even meet people who have played it daily for years, but had no interest in shapers, Jarvis and all that. Sure, a game with fun mechanics doesn’t really need an engaging story, but I think a solid Pokemon theme is more than just branding.

AR game has been on mobile for many years. This became viral only because of Pokemon. I remember playing "hockey" on my phone with my friends a couple years ago on my mobile and it was an AR game.

I've never played Pokemon anything in my life and I thought it sounded interesting and possibly worth a look based on the geocaching-like functionality of it. So they have the get-out-and-go-find-something of geocaching, the branding of Pokemon, the nifty factor of augmented reality, and multiple social aspects ranging from whatever online trading, etc. exists to people meeting trying to hit the same location.

I'm not surprised it's taking off.

And all I could think was "just another way for companies to get real-time imagery of whatever they want, whenever they want it".

Is pervasive tracking just unnoticeable now?

This is a great insight, but a shame you wrapped it in to so much cynicism.

There was a quote somewhere on HN (maybe from idlewords?) along the lines of:

"When's the last time you saw some new technology or program and were honestly excited, instead of worried about the privacy implications?"

The previous iteration of this concept was Ingress, by the same developer. It's an active subculture, but not to the level of Pokemon GO.

The marketing is ingenious. It manages to capitalize on the nostalgia of two generations that grew up playing Pokemon games, and the fact that the stated (virtual) premise of Pokemon was always to roam the world and catch these creatures.

Regardless of the longevity of the game, this phenomenal marriage of a popular videogame series with an experienced alternate reality company will be studied for many years.

And clever reuse of user-collected data from Ingress, to find good public landmarks all over the world.

I had a hunch thats what was going on

I'm in Australia, and I've never seen an irl viral phenomenon on the streets like this. In the inner city of Brisbane, every second person I see is staring at their phone, swiping up to catch Pokemon. Mobs of 100+ people chasing 'lures' are being moved on from parks in the middle of the night. And there was a pub crawl: https://www.facebook.com/events/267390546965461/

Same thing in America. I remember the first night it was released I was walking to the grocery store and it was almost like a low-key street festival going on. People of all ages, genders and races on the streets running around with their phones.

I've never seen anything like it.

we had close to 250 people in a small park near my house close to all day. There were 5 points all within 200 meters of each other, and one gym. It was refreshing to see a lot of people outside that look like they don't get out much.

I just came back from a walk to a large nearby park, and there were dozens of people playing. It struck me as interesting they were mostly groups of friends, and not people playing by themselves.

I think the real tell will be how many people are still playing in a month. The game can get very expensive, especially if you're in a rural area.

I do hope they rebalance it a bit. The only way to get coins without paying money is to own a gym, which is difficult to do. And less you're willing to go farm a bunch of little Pokéstops then you probably have to buy potions. If there was something equivalent to the Pokécenter then things would be better. It be nice to be able to battle friends to train your Pokémon as well.

Niantic are either too busy or really don't care about social media. There's lots of people pointing out real problems with the game. I hope it's not like Ingress all over again, where the only way to get something fixed was to know someone at Google.

Since it has the Pokémon company's brand (and therefore Nintendo's) I really hope to be a great app. One of the things I love about Nintendo with how well they polish all their software.

Instead it's very clear to me that it's a Google app with Pokémon branding. Release fast, bugs are OK, we can fix them later. Don't worry about the fact that the iOS version feels like an Android app and is somewhat obnoxious to use.

I can't help but think that if this game had another two months of polish it would be amazing. Instead, it's in its current slightly crappy state with a serious server issue going on.

Pokemon Go isn't made by Google, it's made by Niantic. Niantic were originally linked to Google, but have been independent since October 2015.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic,_Inc.

It was an internal Google startup that spun out, so I'm assuming they're used to 'the Google way' of operating.

I don't feel great saying this stuff, but I don't know how else to communicate just how startlingly bad the app can be, and how much it feels like a terribly lazy port of an Android app.

I don't know. Maybe if I use the Android app for a few days I'd find out that more or less every single issue is just as bad.

I was wondering about that. There is a 10 minute boosted board ride from home that nets me about 10 pokestops, but most of them seemed like things that wouldn't be anywhere but an urban core: public parks, government buildings, murals, etc. I would imagine even in the suburbs it is far less dense. Did they not adjust for this somehow? I still think it is a revolutionary success even if it goes tamagotchi real fast. I've met so many cool neighbors.

Nope, they haven't adjusted for it at all. I don't think they're using all the Ingress portals so the problem is quite bad in rural areas. Check /r/pokemongo for a few of the posts from users who can't really play because of their location.

I really think that this comes from Google-style thinking - there aren't any workplaces that'd have problems if we turned on cameras / sound automatically [1], there's no other timezones than California, everywhere is high density.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10577601

I caught one of the local, younger, farmers stopping his tractor to catch a Pokemon.

Which is a really great way to do it since playing this game in a rural area basically requires walking significantly further than in a city.

I live in the Valley, and ended up hanging out with some of the people from the pub crawl. It's amazing to watch :)

I live in Docklands in Melbourne. For those unfamiliar, it's basically an ex-port that was transformed into an extension of the city 10 or so years ago. It's known for being basically dead after-hours and on weekends, as there's not much to do and not a lot of culture (and the weather tends to be rubbish, since it's exposed).

This weekend was... different. Even though the weather was miserable, the area was buzzing. I've never seen so many people with a common purpose in the area, or being so friendly and connected. The connection? Magikarp spawn near the water.

I'm surprised there's so little talk about privacy and nuisance implications of this.

We've had a large number of "suspicious behavior" reported in our neighborhood in the past week - and, honestly, it really is suspicious, as in people crawling through the bushes on private property at dusk snapping pictures with cellphones; you know, the kind of stuff that would normally make you go "hmm, I wonder if this house gets robbed soon", and give your local PD a quick call.

But I'm pretty sure it's mostly GO, just looking at how many are around. What's worse is that the game places some of those pokemons in private yards or even inside buildings, with no way to access them short of trespassing...

I just turn off AR mode if it's in someone's house or yard.

I expect this to go quite a bit like Miitomo. Quick uptake, followed by most of the userbase getting bored and forgetting about it.

This game is pretty superficial. There isn't much to do. It unfortunately perpetuates the notion that mobile games cannot have depth or good, lasting gameplay.

Last phone game I really enjoyed was Tiny Wings. That was a while ago. Since then, anything I play on my phone has been in an emulator with a GameKlip and a DualShock 3.

If you are looking for an AR mobile game with more depth maybe you should try Ingress.

All I know is that I mentioned Pokemon GO to my kids (it’s not out in the UK yet, so no advertising push to make them aware of it already) and they were instantly telling me that they had to have it.

I can’t imagine any other brand having that kind of impact - Talk about an unmet need in the marketplace waiting to be filled!

Central Park now https://twitter.com/IGIhosT/status/752357024156028928

The data and methodology is pretty suspect here -- Google for Pokémon Go reports 5m-10m installs while Tinder is reported to have 50m to 100m installs. This is an order of magnitude more worldwide installs. I think the 'current data' is being heavily weighted and producing a too sensational of an article.

For Tinder, about 25% of it's installs came from the US on Android. That still puts it at 12.5m - 25m Android installs range.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tinder

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nianticlab...

Yes, but there were also many uninstalls. These numbers are accounting for that.

Hype started before official release in all countries and people installed it outside of Google Play. In some countries it is still unavailable.

The crazy thing for me is the sheer explosive growth this has seen. I was walking around downtown Redwood City last night near the theater. Easily 50% of the people on the sidewalk walking or standing around were playing as verified by glancing at their screens as I passed them.

And these weren't just kids. Adults, men, women, all ethnicities, etc. were all playing. I've never seen anything like it. They've really stuck to their goal of getting people outside as summed up by this hilarious Reddit post [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongo/comments/4rwf24/pokemon_t...

It honestly has reminded me of when Facebook launched at my college back in 05. I remember being in the library and had Facebook pulled up, another student who I didn't know walked by and was like "Facebook! Add me!"

Immediate flashbacks when last night I was walking to my car from the grocery store with Go up on my phone. Guy yells "Pokemon go, right?"

Currently discussing with friends best way to crack it and make it seem like there's a rare pokemon just up ahead - for all those people who slowly clog up the sidewalks and stations staring at their phones.

Ideas welcome!

(For the official record, since you have to say this these days - I'm only joking)

It's already been noted that the application itself doesn't verify the validity of TLS certs, so it's trivial to MITM the connection and there are currently people working to learn the ins and outs of the API.

It verifies certs, it just doesn't pin them. So if you can hack your phone, you can hack it, shocker. Not a security flaw.

And if you can hack your phone, you can disable pinning.

No need to hack anything, just install your own cert

Curious why you don't think this is a security flaw. Surely a browser failing to pin certificates would be a bad thing, no?

browsers generally don't pin certs. there are methods to do it but everyone is scared to do it as it's a pretty quick way to DoS your entire user-base if you get it wrong.

The intended design of PKI suggests that pinning should not be a thing. unfortunately PKI is broken and pinning is a 'patch' because it's too each to obtain a cert for a property you don't own (hi bluecoat)

There are legitimate reasons to extend the trusted root certificates (notably: corporate deployments). Admitted, I cannot come up with a reason that has anything to do with Pokemon, but - in general I think this should be possible.

Plus: Who do you want to protect and from whom? The only person able to make Pokemon Go (locally, on their phone) accept another certificate is by having full access to the phone in the first place. It's the user, 'hacking' his own device.

If this leads to exploits on the Pokemon Go server for some reason, than _those_ are the problems. The communication between app and Pokemon Go server uses TLS, even if I spoof a certificate for my very own device.

For me this is one of the examples of Raymond Chen's "If you're already on the other side of the hatch it isn't a security exploit", but I might absolutely fail to understand the risks of course.

wow, thanks for the reply. Although i'm not sure why my question was downvoted...

Has anyone made any progress ?

https://www.reddit.com/r/jailbreak/comments/4s6rx7/discussio...

Thanks!

im not interested in hacking or modifying things, but would love to get api access to the data - can you link to a forum where this stuff is being worked on?

The first pokecrime has already been committed -- criminals placed a "lure" in the middle of a night in a secluded space, and robbed teens that showed up there at 2am:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2016/07/10/four-suspects-...

Yesterday I was browsing pictures of huge groups of players staring at their phones in public areas and thought, wow, what a perfect opportunity for criminals to steal some phones.

I am totally not shocked at this news.

The Twitter comparison seems very off. Note that the article is talking about Android only. According to https://about.twitter.com/company, Twitter has 310 MAUs and 83% are Mobile. They've publicly stated MAU to DAU retention is 44% (Bloomberg, etc). That leaves Twitter on Android with 40-60M+ DAUs. Pokemon Go's download number which is plainly visible in the Google Play Store is >5M but <10, and that's worldwide. So Android Pokemon Go = 5-10M DAUs MAX, Android Twitter = 40-60M DAUs

Has anybody gone through their privacy policy? The speed that this became viral and the possibilities to have an enormous amount of people take video all over the place gives me the heeby jeebies.. Some of the things in the policy sound very, very invasive.

https://www.nianticlabs.com/privacy/pokemongo/en/

Edit: Heh, I went on indeed to see if there was a spike of video analyst jobs and got this awesome ad on the right: https://imgur.com/MMyjbQN

Let's wait a month to see what engagement looks like. Most people are downloading simply because everyone is talking about it - especially news media

Engagement is crazy right now. I drove home at 3am last night and stopped by a PokeStop, and as I was leaving the parking lot, another car pulled in just to play... Same at the church by my place 15 minutes later. Different car.

What will really be telling is how many people still play after a week or two.

I feel that if they don't get the server issues under control soon (I saw they delayed the European lunch) then it doesn't matter what WOULD have happened the game is going to lose players in the social/network effects won't be there.

I think more of an issue will be people hitting "completion" relatively soon. Certainly, the most interesting part right now is just catching new Pokemon, but there aren't so many that you can't burn through most of that enjoyment fairly quickly.

The gym battles are terribly boring.

So far the game only includes the 151 original Pokémon, and I imagine it should be pretty straightforward to add in the later generations (700-something total). That's without adding things like shinies, gender, etc.

I was super excited but then pretty fast realized that:

a) its the same as ingress. With all but even more of the annoying bugs. b) It eats even more battery than ingress c) Its purely pay to win. I could have lived with free 2 play and buying some special or cosmetic items. But not selling essential items ...

Currently i mostly wonder why people don't care about that. I hate playing games where other players can just spend $10 and overtake hours worth of skilling.

>I hate playing games where other players can just spend $10 and overtake hours worth of skilling.

But you can't. Not really. I guess it's location-dependant but if you live anywhere near a student campus or town there are literally tens of pokestops in a short 10min walk. My SO has got from level 1-11 without spending a penny, just by incorporating more pokestops into her little 'route' she has going. Added to that, the cooldown on a pokestop is 5 mins iirc, so you can pretty much milk them infinitely. If there's a stop in a pub for example, you'd be able to get 12 spins in the hour it takes you to catch up with your friends. Each spin tends to yield between 1-5 poke/greatballs.

Not sure what else is p2w, I was in the same boat as you until I saw how much progress my SO made without touching her purse.

I guess arguably the incense items in the cash shop are 'p2w', but you do get these through levelling up. Haven't seen any appear at pokestops yet. I've used 5 myself and all I've obtained through it are more Weedles and Pidgeys.

That says nothing except that its easy to get started. The strategie may is to catch players 3-5 days in who already need more than a day intensive work for a single level.

Dont get me wrong. I was niantic fan from beginning, one of the first Ingress players, probably even the first in my country. I really appreciate what they are doing.

I just simply refuse to touch pay 2 win games as they always get frustrating at some point.

This game has all the makings of a fad.

The AR angle is new but this is simply Flappy Birds all over again.

Not saying it's not a fad, but isn't it different in quite a number of ways? The Pokemon brand and geo coordinate aspects had all my friends ("core gamers", if you will, who would probably not have dreamed of playing flappy birds for fun) playing it all weekend.

I'm into this game. It's fun, it gamifies walking and going to parks. I love that I can play this for a few minutes while walking my kid to the park, or while he's at the park playing.

Is it perfect? Hell no, but I play it in spite of how popular it is. It is fun, engaging, rewards activities I want to do more (walk) and really doesn't work well in the house. My wife likes that I wanted to get out of the house more this weekend.

Is it kinda sad that I need a videogame to make going outside fun for me? Yeah sorta, but that's who I am.

EDIT: One final note. This game uses the Pokemon I played with as a kid. The ones I traded on cards and really leverages that nostalgia to make it something I want to do. I want to catch these specific pokemon because I've done it before. And it's more rewarding because I have to physically earn them too.

You don't think including a brand that has been globally popular for 20 years changes anything?

I think the layman that is just jumping on the fad wagon will get bored of Pokemon Go within a month or two. The diehard Pokemon fans will continue playing, but I don't see how they can keep the hook in for long.

It's like Pokemon Cards - they went from cards to practically currency back to cards within 6 months.

The older members of my family didn't collect Pokemon cards 15 years ago, but all of them are playing Pokemon Go right now.

Flappy Bird is still more popular than I imagined. I went to Dave and Buster's for my nephew's birthday, and there was an arcade version of the game there, with a ~2' wide by ~4' tall screen. People were happily paying good money to repeatedly press the single button on the console. In fact, I was surprised to see quite a few popular mobile games offered up in arcade format there, with people playing them.

I don't think this will be a fad.

I've seen many people who are 'older' now get into playing Pokemon mostly because it strikes up the nostalgia factor. For many of us (people who experienced Pokemon in the '90s), being able to "become part of the world of Pokemon" was something that would have been quite awesome, and this game really allows that to become a thing.

Saying it's a fad like Flappy Birds is a gross oversimplification. Also, the key difference between FB and Pokemon Go is that FB is meant more as an arcade game you play in very short bursts. Pokemon Go, on the other hand, is meant to be walked around with where it becomes part of your regular activities.

Cave lector: Twitter, in this case, seems to refer to the Android twitter app, compared against the Pokemon GO Android app. If that is the case, I expect the reported Twitter DAU to be much lower than the actual Twitter DAUs.

Caveat? ;) I mean, those readers can be scary, but...

Cave is the singular imperative form. Cave lector therefore makes sense, meaning "beware, reader", while caveat means "warning".

Either should be fine; caveat is the jussive subjunctive, and so the meaning is similar.

It's difficult to escape the feeling that Nintendo is not exactly central to the success of Pokémon Go, and that the 7BB increase in market cap is. . . excessive.

Fact is, this game is the work of a small VC-backed game shop in San Francisco with some great talent. They license the Pokémon characters, which are owned by The Pokémon Company, which is minority owned by Nintendo.

Nintendo is also an investor in Niantic Labs. If you think the price is high, you're welcome to short it.

Do you have a link for this? (I believe you, but I don't see it reflected in any of the VC DBs.)

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/nianticlabs-google#/...

So short it.

Just image if the game was actually good... It's kind of a shame :(

I'm optimistic that the game will continue getting fleshed out; there's no way Niantic isn't going to capitalize on this.

I don't doubt it'll get better, but I also don't expect any major rewriting of the core loops / mechanics, which might invalidate user progress

The way I see it, they've got like two weeks tops to flesh it out more. Because after that, running around catching them and struggling against the weird gym system until you win is going to stop being enjoyable at all (and I do find it enjoyable for now!). Even just a bare bones friends system and a combat system that utilizes the 2 attack method gym battles have could go a long way to give the game a little more staying power.

I don't have a link to the article handy at the moment, but they've already said they'll be adding player trades.

Honestly I hope they add functionality so people who run into each other while playing can battle. It'd really be just like the game at that point, other than the battle system being very different.

Kind of cool idea but I feel like they didn't do enough with it. Really it's walk around and collect Pokemon. But what kills me is to do anything in the game you have to go places. Which means if you live in an unpopulated area (or area where nobody played Ingress) there are no Gyms or other points of interest. So you literally can do nothing except have the game up and hope Pokemon pop up. You have to physically be near a Gym to battle Pokemon. What the hell do you do when you are not near places and want to play? Nothing. It's basically a walking app with a Pokemon overlay.

Kind of bad for those in low population areas... but from Niantic's perspective they are going after a larger market.

I agree. I really hope they will work on it and introduce more features. This would be a great post-mortem, if there will be one.

Yeah...I have serious doubts about the longevity of the game. There's some cool tech behind it, and the sense of being part of a worldwide event is really impressive. But the core game itself just feels so...bland to me. The battle system is incredibly shallow even when compared to the first Pokemon game which came out 20 years ago. And this is coming from someone who grew up with the original series and loved it.

The terrifying thing is how the games location of items can manipulate foot traffic and could show bias of one business over the other across the street in turn manipulating be economy by moving us and our eventual spending around like lemmings....but it's just Pokemon right?

Yeah - it's definitely "new age" advertising but why jump to a "terrifying" "moving us around like lemmings" conclusion? If a company wants to spend money to drop lures good for them. People can go there if they choose or just ignore it.

Why is that terrifying? It's not like our spending isn't moved around by the whims of companies at the moment.

I am really surprised it has taken this long for such an app to emerge. After smartphones took off and gained GPS, I remember sitting in a friend's student den (ca. 2009) idly brainstorming an AR game that would let you roam the city as an RPG character, occasionally battling or collaborating with other players. We thought it was pretty obvious and we wouldn't be the first to think of it, so we never bothered to actually pursue the idea.

Ingress was the first big game I remember that provided something similar, but it kind of ended there. The Pokemon theme is pretty much perfect for such a setup: inventory, challenges, not too martial and you get to piggyback on an existing story. Our vision was more geared towards the WoW gamer crowd.

I'm just waited for the first theft tied to this. Shouldn't take a thief long to get the app and find a seedy area to drop a Lure in. Wait for unsuspecting hapless victim(s) to stand around staring at their phones oblivious to the world for an extended period of time and it would be like shooting fish in a barrel for a ride-by phone snatcher on a bike.

Wait no longer: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/thieves-pokemon-find-p...

Having lived in Bolivia, I would never even -dream- of playing this in a third world country. People get shot for smartphones/tablets there, no respect for life.

and it would be like shooting fish in a barrel

Catching Pokemon in a barrel?

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned anything about Niantic being an "independent" spinoff from Google/Alphabet.

Interesting to think about what personal information they're gaining from this, as well as mapping information.

Nintendo (along with Google and the Pokemon Company, which Nintendo also partially owns) invested $30 million into Niantic 9 months ago [1].

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-16/nintendo-g...

Is Tinder the right app to make the comparison with? Game vs Game would be better, like Angry birds or something.

It's a swiping game. Comparison is valid.

I agree, my first thought in seeing this headline, even the applicable market of people is much, much bigger for Pokemon GO. In addition to the entire market of Tinder, there's also kids and married people.

The only good reason I can think of Tinder being used is because it's a well-known app and involves real life social things. I can't think of a well-known game that has in person/real world social interaction like this.

And, as on tinder, it's all about 'catching em all'! ;)

This Guy Used a Drone to Try to Catch Pokémon

http://gizmodo.com/can-you-speed-up-your-pokemon-go-progress...

Release in Germany is delayed due to server issues. You can download the APK and play the game if you want to. I'm sticking with Ingress until the final release.

It's pretty bad that Google can't scale this. It's not like the mass of users is unexpected. They have Ingress data to go on and there's the Pokemon factor. Makes me not want to use the Google cloud for my next project.

Google / Alphabet != Niantic. [1]

I'd be pretty embarrassed at not predicting the load that a game like this would put on servers. I wonder if they got a good deal from GCE?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic,_Inc.

The game is acting like a Tinder for Pokemon fans. I've seen hoardes of people gathering around Pokestops and socializing as a side-effect.

Can someone explain how it works? I understand that it's AR- and location-based. How/where/why do you acquire the virtual creatures? Do you have to look for them aimlessly or are there clues?

Various landmarks are 'pokestops', where you can get pokeballs and other items. Some of those places are gyms, where you can pit your pokemon against others.

The pokemon themselves are spawned from random spots on the map and wander around, if you're in the area and have the app open you'll see it and can capture it by throwing pokeballs at it. There's a kind of wonky proximity indicator for nearby pokemon, and they're shown on the map by the random appearance of rustling grass.

Just played a little bit on someone else's account. You walk around looking at a map on your phone (very little detail on the map, it's just a 3d street map) and sometimes you see a pokemon running around on your block. You tap on the pokemon and a screen opens up where you have to throw a ball at it. When you hit it, you capture it. There are also these floating disks with images of local landmarks, and when you swipe on them, you get more balls or other prizes. That's about it.

You missed leveling, evolving, gyms, the meta game, searching for rare Pokemon, and more.

You walk around until you see a Pokemon near your player, then tap it. Then the game goes into "camera" mode where you can snap a picture of the pokemon placed in the real world, or throw pokeballs at it by swiping your finger properly.

You walk around and your player walks around using the GPS.

To be fair:

> Data published today by SimilarWeb indicates that the mobile game is poised to surpass Twitter in daily active users on Android.

It seems to me that almost every other app is about to or has surpassed Twitter in Daily/Monthly active users. Twitter seems to have some pretty big problems keeping its users engaged.

Instagram and Snapchat are not just every other app. I think Twitter is used as a reference in these kind of statements because their number of active users is pretty stagnant.

I don't do much cardio but I walked 4 miles this weekend trying to catch Pokemon. I love a game that makes me healthier.

Just a side note I leave here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12069450

You should look at auto detecting the users location instead of a drop down menu.

Thanks for the suggestion. => Done :)

Could I be cheeky and ask to see the bit of code that achieves the affect?

https://github.com/Eun/is-pokemon-available/blob/gh-pages/in...

Not sure what you're polling, but it says it's not available in Australia despite Australia being the first release country. Might just want to check that out.

I think this number is considerably more impressive than beating the number of Tinder installs.

Indeed, although I'd bet a much larger percentage of the population knows about Pokemon than Tinder.

Going with that, I'd bet a much larger percentage of the population knows about Pokemon than Twitter.

Well, doubt how many will remain after 1 month.

I'd imagine people will stay as they did with the original Pokemon. To this day, they are still adding more and more Pokemon. I'd expect they'd treat this game in a similar fashion. They'll probably introduce trading (already confirmed), a battling system amongst peers, side objectives, events (battle Mewtwo) as we saw in the commerical, etc.

I've run into people playing this game in the park, at Publix, in Costco and even restaurants. It's a SENSATION, never quite seen something like this. I'm excited for the future for Nintendo - we could be witnessing the birth of a new age of Nintendo supremacy!

The most important quality for such a game is how many players are playing it. In that sense, Pokemon GO is already far better than Ingress or anything else.

It's a much less cringey way to meet someone than Tinder, especially if you want to meet someone who's into Pokemon.

Pokémon Go is very similar to the Nintendo DS game "Treasure World" (2009), where you collect randomized virtual loot based on Wi-Fi networks around you:

http://www.gamesradar.com/treasure-world-review/

Do I need to feel out of place in this world? I still dont understand why the game is so popular!

It's the social aspect and the act of "dude there's a Snorlax at the basketball court let's go" and getting a group of your friends to go, then as you show up you see other people doing the same thing.

It's an innocent conversation starter. What better ice-breaker between social groups than "You playing Pokemon?" Even people who aren't playing know what's going on. The game itself isn't the selling point here. Being an IRL Pokemon trainer is.

Everyone now with a smartphone can Pokémon game for free! This captures the previous market who grew out of it. Furthermore AR works very well with the Pokémon theme.

A story of how 2 people nearly died playing this game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2KXVfnw4rg

Yeah, but will it get me laid?

If you count meeting people and possibly getting to know them to be a first step on the path to that, then yes. It's very easy to see who's playing the app nearby, and people often get talking while they're trying to take over a gym over waiting for spawns near a lure.

It will get you to a gym at least.

Yeah, but what's the daily active users like?

Just a side note I leave here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12069450

I wonder what the intersection of the sets of gamers and people that wonder how they can improve their productivity is.

Does this include downloads from apkmirror etc.?

Tinder - gotta catch 'em all!

Who cares about Tindr. Tindr is the poster boy for lowest common denominator both in the social and technological sense. Ok, maybe Ashley Madison.

>Tindr is the poster boy for lowest common denominator

Why yes, it does have very broad appeal.

So do porn, gambling, and films like 'Transformers' that literally have no plot.

That's pretty harsh for an app that just shows you people's European vacation photos and lets you talk to them.

Aside from some basic benefits, it mostly encourages people to make judgements about important things ('human relationships') based on the most absolutely material, fleeting and trivial physical elements. Especially given the magnitude of 'choice', it commoditizes people. Even worse, it normalizes this behaviour. Far from connecting us, it actually disconnects us.

Talking recently to a female friend recently who is on Tindr ... it was pretty astonishing how numb she'd become to the profiles... absolute objectification. Even as she was fairly self-aware about it.

It's about as healthy as nicotine.

Admittedly, it's an absolutely brilliant business model, tapping into primal forces, but it's not a step forward. It's a step sideways, at best, and maybe even a little step back.

When VC meets creativity meets technology, it will induce a lot of dollars in this direction irrespective of long term positive economic or social outcomes, often taking attention away from 'better' causes. Absent reasonably enlightened consideration (and I mean just 'basic' consideration, not some holier-than-though ideology), there is no moving forward - just moving in random directions, pulled by the arbitrary forces of hyper-populist memes and trends. Some will make a lot of $$$ as the money sloshes around in a zero-sum game, but surely, but that really isn't the point. In the long run, the Valley and tech scene will lose authenticity and be about as credible as politicians, homeopaths, or Amway.

I'll bet $100 that anyone working in tech or any other industry for more than 5-8 years, will start to understand that it's not about 'a job' or 'making bling', or 'being startup famous' and that they work they do has impact across cultures and communities, and that they are ultimately responsible for whatever it is they are working on. Given that there are 10 000 projects around to chose from, it's hot hard to climb higher on the ladder than Tindr, by almost any measure, even $$$.

I don't really care about Tindr that much, I have about as much 'against it' as I do a ridiculous Transformers film (which is nothing), but it's not worth any attention either.

I'm looking forward to Pokemon :)

> absolutely material, fleeting and trivial physical elements

What would those be? Whether they find the potential date attractive in the first place?

Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Making a snap decision about a person based on a 1/2 second assertion.

Of course, looks matter. We make such 'snap decisions' all day long. The problem is, absent anything else, that's the entire decision. In the real world, personality goes a much longer way than the 1000 words in a photo.

At least most online dating apps try to develop and communicate a sense of who you are, which in some cases, they do very well.

AR >> VR

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