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Comment by donkeyd | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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