Ask HN: Are the Pokemon Go articles real, or is their PR firm amazing? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are the Pokemon Go articles real, or is their PR firm amazing?

25 pointssomid327 comments

News outlets are typically very slow for new startups, venture, products, etc. Specially mass-consumer outlets/ I can't imagine how in a single week there are 100's of articles on Pokemon Go. Any thoughts?

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I haven't played it, but pretty much every time I look out the window of my apartment here in NYC there are random people wandering aimlessly around my block with their phone pointed in weird directions. I have friends and family in my hometown telling me all sorts of stories about swarming amusement parks, masses of kids out in the street etc...

Genuinely viral, not a PR blitz. The network effect of human activity in close proximity, physically gathering in already crowded public spaces, and then spreading to areas of non-players is probably the key viral component on this one. Someone sees other people on the street playing it, they check it out, explore other areas, the network grows and so on.

Likely more effective virally than social networks because it's a well developed game mechanic - skill, mastery, rewards etc - and apparently it encourages strangers to interact, not just existing social circles. So the activity leaps over the "tribal" firewall.

It just turns out that viral social media manifested in the real world starts resembling an actual virus.

absolutely agree, this is one of the first occurrences of socially viral that I've seen at this scale that exists outside of a persons immediate social graph. Theres no share with friends on social networks. Its more about going to locations, seeing people playing it and sharing what pokemon are available, or who's your most rare pokemon.

Pokémon is one of the biggest franchises in the world. It's like the McDonald's of gaming, and the people that grew up consuming it are now in their 20s-30s and extremely active on Social Media.

Before major news outlets pick it up, micro-blogs, niche blogs for gaming, and other entertainment media outlets are going to publish stories about it, and the content writers of those sites are all the demographic that grew up with Pokémon, so it's no surprise really.

Pokemon is a 50 billion dollar franchise. It has made billions of dollars for its owners. The franchise has made more profits than twitter, Facebook and maybe a few other unicorns combined.

Its not that surprising it is doing well.

I was wondering this as well because...pokemon came along...when? After my time, anyway, like late 90s.

And then kind of died down, I think, or at least wasn't a monstrous craze at least.

And now in 2016, does it mean that everyone who was super into them 15 years ago is all for it?

If I think about what I was super into at 10, the nostalgia doesn't go that far today.

I mean I see I'm late to the party here and everyone's already said it's real, but I was just surprised.

Around 2007, for some months there, the world was saturated with articles about Second Life. Eventually I saw an article about how it had come about as a result of hiring a new PR firm.

(Or has nostalgia changed? At least if I imagine giving 1940s kids something connected to that in 1965, it seems like they'd be like "Um, I'm a grown wo/man." But today hollyworld is all superhero movies.)

Bonus question: How long before we grow really sick of hearing about it?

> And now in 2016, does it mean that everyone who was super into them 15 years ago is all for it?

Almost embarrased to say, I played pokemon back in good old black-and-white gameboy days. Then I played Pokemon for a two-month stretch last year and was highly dissapointed there wasn't an app for it.

I've yet to download Pokemon Go, but that's only because I have 12.1 MB of free space left on my phone.

My cousins played Pokémon in elementary school. They were obsessed. They invited me to play a couple games when I visited them (I had no idea which Pokémons were good). Now, they are graduating college. It is an entire generation that was raised on Pokémon, now starting their millenial lives.

It's probably the most interesting thing that has happened in games since Minecraft. Mobile games were stuck on Bejeweled clones or even more upmarket stuff like Clash of Clans. This almost guarantees a shift in development dollars towards AR.

Seeing Pokémon Go players in person is a little disconcerting though. They are more 'out of it' than usual, where 'out of it' baseline is the person texting while walking down the street.

Just wait when they mix VR with AR and we see people with Vive/Oculus-like helmets on the street.

made me think of this [0]

[0] http://hyper-reality.co/

The buzz for this game is very real. I've been in SF and LA over the last week and you see people walking around everywhere with this game on. The only question is that because of the barrier of having to be in physical locations and having to walk/drive is this game sustainable. I think with additional game mechanics niantic can definitely make this a long term hit.

I think that if you ever leave the house at all, you can play no matter what else you're doing. Today, I went to an appointment, and there was a Pokemon in front of the building. I went to the store - there were 3 outside. I went to a large park - there were numerous Pokemon, PokeStops, and gyms. I didn't go to any of these places to play the game.

Actually I've been wondering if a PR agency has been running a huge campaign against Pokemon Go. There were a bunch of articles last week:

- People sent to churches and graveyards

- One person found a dead body while playing

- Someone supposedly had an accident while playing in the car

- One black person pointing he couldn't play the game safely as it would be dangerous to wander around aimlessly as a black guy in the city

- A bunch of inappropriate places like strip clubs were included

This seems to me like the next candidate for overblown, unjustified outrage. Like D&D in the 80s, or Google Glass recently. I'm just waiting for Moms Against Pokemon Go.

"Moms Against Pokemon Go"

There's now a hilarious contradiction, where parents are telling children to NOT go outside and run around.

It does seem like the locations they've chosen for pokéstops are biased towards churches and public gathering spaces like courthouse squares. I'm not sure if this is intentional.

Source: I live in one of the most historic neighborhoods in the US (many old buildings and churches).

They are located where Ingress portals are, which were specifically intended to be local places of interest - monuments, courthouses, schools, churches etc.

No, I think it's just actually that popular of a franchise. A ton of my friends (early 20's) are talking about it on Facebook to the point where its a large portion of my entire newsfeed.

Well, Niantic already had their first successful product years ago, so I wouldn't call them a startup anymore.

Also they riding on a 20 year old hype train that had nothing to do with them.

So it's in the news because of The Pokemon Company, Nintendo and Google/Alphabet.

Niantic is no longer part of Google (never part of Alphabet),they spun off to their own entity.

I never said that it is.

In Stockholm, I've observed two different people taking photographs of stuff for their Pokémon Go collection or whatever it is. It's spreading quickly like the Harlem Shake, Ice Bucket Challenge and the Gagnam Style video of the past.

Definitely genuinely viral (although of course that does not preclude the pokemon PR people from pushing articles!)

I'm not surprised. I have multiple friends who bought Nintendo 3DS's to play Pokemon over the past couple years... mind you, these are not nerdy kids. They are mainstream friends who are not gamers. They've been openly playing pokemon and there has been zero stigma attached to it.

I think what's most amazing about this latest craze is that it managed to attract these mainstream, non-gamers. My Facebook feed (early 20s college educated) is seriously 20-30% Pokemon posts. And it's not the nerdy kids posting screenshots, it's people you would never expect, evenly distributed across genders.

Can you imagine people sharing screenshots of their world of warcraft quests on facebook?!

See all these people in the below photos? They're playing it. At night. In a public park. I walked through there at midnight on Saturday night and it was just as busy. During the day it's even more so. Walking through just about any inner-suburban public park currently involves watching groups of 20somethings scurry around trying to locate pokemon.

It has been explosively successful in the traditionally non-gamer markets. News outlets are picking it up because it's so ubiquous.

https://media.apnarm.net.au/img/media/images/2016/07/11/b882...

Really interested in the behavioural dynamics that caused this specific area to be the "go to" place in Brisbane for Pokemon. I get off at that Southbank CityCat stop on my daily commute and have seen this crowd grow almost exponentially.

On the day of launch, there wasn't many people there. Second day I had a chat to about 15 people who were gathered (nobody knew each other and were there because of the 3x lured Pokestops in close proximity). Day four was then 100+ people. Now from afternoon onwards there's a persistent crowd.

PokeGo has been the quickly-to-viral thing I've ever seen. Even on day two we could sit looking out the office window and every 5th person was playing.

My girlfriend who never plays video games had me walking around the neighboorhood with her, catching pokemon. This is the real deal, not PR.

Read about PoGo players wandering into courthouses taking pictures and getting into trouble in Sydney.

Pied Piper moment of technology (the original story not the HBO show!)

Dude.

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