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Comment by skilled | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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