Ad Agencies Scramble to Form ‘Pokémon Go’ Strategies
wsj.com
wsj.com
(I've not installed Go, and don't intend to, so it may have some actual game in there beyond collecting and tagging locations. Everything I've read seems to indicate it's as shallow as Ingress with a graphics change).
By the time they have a strategy and have included locations the moment will have probably passed. I also wonder how non-playing folks at a sponsored gym (say) will feel about the foyer or cafe being full of kids playing phone games. At least some attempts will carry negative as well as positive consequences.
So far Go lets you search for pokemon, power them up, and "battle" with them. Trading is coming. Isn't that pretty much everything the previous umpteen Pokemon games let you do?
Unless they flesh out the gameplay (either with new elements or mechanics, or by "porting" over from the existing games in the Pokemon franchise), the success of the game could easily be short lived.
Seriously, all they need to do is add a basic pokemon PVP with the same battle mechanics from the mainstream, and maybe random events, and they could keep it going for a good while longer.
Also, the always-on-gps is a huge issue with it. They need to find some way to lessen it.
I think this is very true, when I was in 5th grade It wasn't wandering around catching pokemon that made me love the game. It was battling my friends, and trading with them.
Catching Pokemon is the core gameplay aspect of it. Walking around, discovering new places, new Pokemon is what the game is currently meant to be about. That is why the PvP is laughable compared to other games.
Then again, that only really makes sense if they really thought it was going to have a bunch of new players, and I'm not sure there were indications it was going to be this big?
On the other hand, the strategic games that are at the heart of Ingress depth don't exist in Pokemon Go, so we'll see.
* It's not even obvious that the first 'catch' is a choice between the three starting pokemon?
* What's the green circle which changes shape mean?
* What's 3 footprints? Look online for a bunch of myth already being set up.
* One prominent site is still suggesting you can "pick up" missed pokeballs so they're not wasted!
Ingress' tutorial & tooltips were far better designed.
Niantic will have to iterate quickly to build in depth. The need to walk around is a lot of friction to playing a location based game. They'll have to introduce features that are enticing enough to overcome that friction. Simply collecting pokemon and filling out the pokedex isn't going to be enough in the long term.
The only reason I play Ingress is the social aspect of it, and the need for walking. I don't have any other game in my cellphone that I play regularly and I don't care about angry birds and so on. If I want a seated experience my computer has far better games.
So, it depends on the user, there are no absolutes in gaming.
Let's say you have company A and company B who offer the same service in a city. Company A now buys a sponsored virtual Ingress portal / PokeStop / ad-banner in the real-world location of company B with the message "Come visit us at location of company A, we have more pokestops and we offer better prices".
Would this be legal?
In Baltimore, there are 2 competing casinos about 10 miles apart off of the same highway. When you approach the newer casino from any direction, there are multiple billboards advising you to keep driving to the older competing casino for better payouts and other bonuses.
Just imagine casino A would pay some guys to carry advertising sign inside of casino B. Those guys would be removed instantly.
Or let's say somebody creates a AR game where you can leave signs with random texts everywhere. And then somebody decides to plant a sign with "OP is bundle of sticks" on your property. In the real world you can just remove the sign and call the cops, but what would you do in the AR world?
If there will be too much shenanigans I can see that in the future your real property boundary might translate into the virtual AR world.
I can access the mcdonald's website when I am inside a burguer king.
I can phone a friend and get a suggestion to buy a Xbox when I am evaluating footage from a PS4.
I can be at home, access the starbucks website and get a pop-up from hangouts where a friend might ask me to have coffee... in his house!
What do you mean inside?
It is currently not an issue but just imagine that something like Facebook/Twitter/Instagram explodes into AR space and _everybody_ starts using it as their main mode of interaction with people. If Burgerking buys all the virtual ad-space inside every McDonalds location then you can be sure that there will be lawsuits.
That is, until the meatspace law catches up. Until then, nobody but the AR creator can enforce anything.
Answer two:
> That depends. Is this[0] covering my view, being used by my daughter?
> Am I comparing prices on the internet? Should McDonald's care, or have control over what happens inside my smartphone, or what I can see?
> Am I spoofing my (smartphone) location to pretend I am in fact inside a burguer king, and indeed seeing the Augmented Reality Giant Whooper they have, because I enjoy playing their minigames, but prefer to eat at McDonalds?
As a parent, would you seek to prevent an AR app from allowing overlays of an artificially created model of a beaten and bruised child over your child's body when a user looks at them?
As a spouse, would you seek to prevent an AR app from allowing overlays of a pornographic representation of their body when a user looks at them?
As a homeowner, would you seek to prevent an AR app from allowing overlays of "#blacklivesdontmatter" from appearing as graffiti when a user looks at your home?
As a parent, spouse or homeowner, I wouldn't. I would like it to stop, in the same way I would like that guy downstairs to be nice to me.
But I will just postpone as long as I can to interact with people that use said AR app as lens for the world.
Because the problem is not the overlays. The problem is when people use the overlays / AR app as a truth finder. And I don't care much for those kinds of people, neither does anyone I care about.
When I'm standing at the counter at McDonald's, an ad for Burger King is going to have to be really compelling to matter.
In my mind, you can look at this two ways:
1. You can't tell people what they can and cannot look at on their technology just because they've entered your "space". Maybe sometime down the road competitive geo-blocking will be a thing (i.e., different companies will auction off parts of cities and let businesses buy up ad-relevancy based on location), but right now there's no such case. I think legally, this is the equivalent of someone walking into McDonalds and a Burger King happens to play on Spotify or there's a banner ad in an app for Wendy's.
2. The advertisement, despite using real world GPS coordinates, is occuring within the application, not an actual advertisement inside the store.
In a way, I guess the question really is "do you have a right to your GPS coordinates?", and I don't think you do. What people do with the coordinates elsewhere may be subject to some laws, but nothing in terms of commerce.
This is all really straightforward, the mental gymnastics required to turn this into a problem is really mental masturbation.
Yelp has a "nearby" feature. If I pull up yelp while standing in a restaurant, do you think the restaurant should have full control over the reviews? Obviously, the answer should always be no. There's nothing really new here.
While the general point you are trying to make still stands, as regards the specific example, I expect that the possibility of hostile ads is fairly far down the list of reasons that casinos, of all places, are going to crack down hard on any use of AR technology on the premises before long.
The lawsuits that force google to blur faces and some houses in Germany seem to indicate otherwise. Those are privacy related problems, but I think they still show that your blanket statement needs more nuance.
Like someone below me mentioned, virtual ads could be pretty powerful too, and, y'know, what's to stop someone from constructing virtual dicks in front of a building. (Besides whoever runs the AR service) There's really not a DMCA-like-thing for AR stuff.
http://associatesmind.com/2016/07/11/is-pokemongo-illegal/
It's a novel issue of first impression. There is no controlling statute or case law. The most we can do is make informed speculation at this point.
My guess is that at some point a court will find that property rights will extend to geo-spatial, virtual property boundaries. That is, you retain control of how your property appears in 'cyberspace.'
I wonder what the military thinks about the Ingress portals and PokemonStops on their bases. In worst case that will results in some virtual ban zones around military compounds where AR is forbidden.
Because AR "isn't real", should you have no recourse against this? At the gut level, that doesn't feel right, so as much as some people want to pretend The Web is some wild west of freedom and lawlessness, it really makes sense (some times, with experts consulted) to have (some) regulations.
I'm not saying people shouldn't be able to speak freely, but somewhere out there is a line that crosses from exercising freedom of speech into harassment.
This comic [0] explains it nicely. Just because it's on the internet and "not real life" doesn't mean it doesn't affect your happiness or your life "offline."
[0] - https://xkcd.com/1216/
It's called a troll, and no I wouldn't, because I'm not a tremendous wanker. I'm an emotionally stable adult who can deal with someone calling me names.
I prioritize free speech over the feelings of people who can't take shit on the Internet. It's not that I've never felt bad after someone criticized me on the Internet; it's that I understand that life is full of positive and negative interactions and you have to deal with both. Crying and demanding that insulting you be made illegal is a puerile and unhealthy response.
> It's absolutely insane to suggest that one ought to have control over some abstract data
I was responding to that to say that it's not insane to govern the internet either by new laws or by applying and extending existing laws. My point was to illustrate a case that should without a doubt merit some governance when it's just "abstract data."
You could argue it's just as real as the other fairly arbitrary borders that define public vs private property.
-75,40,28
That's a (chosen) coordinate pair and an (invented) observation about something at the coordinate pair. Will the property owner be able to force me to delete my 28?
Let's say someone publishes a book of addresses or GPS coordinates. They claim these are hotbeds of paranormal activity. Or ley lines. Or something. People are going to visit these locations based on fictional claims. Possibly they might even get something they value out of visiting the location. (Information from the dead, positive energy vibrations, whatever.)
AR that claims to be authoritatively non-fictional has been done too. Think of a tourist guide book, saying what is worth visiting around town.
I don't see how "the app told me I would find something there" is different from "the book told me I would find something there".
Which is theoretically true, if you built your own OS, your own clients to every app, your own perfect spam capture...
Paying $200 for someone else's AR device that "just works" vs. rolling your own and maintaining it? What do you thin the average consumer is going to pick.
I don't like how my property is portrayed on Google or Yelp. I have no recourse. Why is Pokemon Go different?
I'm glad that guy seems okay with it, but there are real repercussions to a third party instantly turning your home into a location in a game without your permission or even giving warning. If these sorts of games become more popular, someone will start raising a stink.
I'm finding it increasingly difficult to accept business that needs to "latch on" to trends and product of others. If you can't sell your product and services on their own merits, then maybe the existence of your business isn't exactly justified.
We have a world with far too much stuff. For every business meeting a need there are 50 cheap copies and 20 not so cheap desperately trying to get noticed.
Every trend will get latched on to an ever increasing degree. Most trends come from commercial intent anyway and the latching on is just turning on the "monetisation strategy". No one wants to sell a thing any more, but a recurring licence.
It's no wonder adblocking is growing like topsy
I don't mean this maliciously towards you or advertisers, but you need to understand that advertisers see the world through ad-tinted glasses - you can tell it based on how they try to sell physical ad-space. A billboard will gleefully tick away with "number of people who would have seen your ad". Placards above urinals or in stalls in bathrooms will talk to you about "now this is captive audience". A person isn't a person, they're a demographic of set {male, gay, republican, gunowner, iphoneuser} or any series of fields.
I do agree, it's annoying and as a person, insulting to have companies prying away at my privacy just to try to sell me stuff I don't want or need, or sometimes already have. (just looknig at skype right now on my work machine, it's trying to sell me Office 365 when we're married to the Windows Environment already) But I'm not an advertiser - I don't see the world through their eyes, and they would make far less money if they saw the world through my eyes.
A good advertiser isn't really congruent with respecting privacy or letting things be, and sometimes the difference that jumping on a trend like this can make is "selling [100] good burgers" a day versus "selling [500] good burgers" a day. Even if your burgers stand on merit, if you had the metrics to show that you could quintuple sales, wouldn't you try at least? Even if you fell as short as 1.5(burgers_sold) compared to 5(burgers_sold), you'd still likely make more than you spent on the ad.
It sucks, but as much as they're jerks for doing it, we're suckers that keep on buying and making it work, or at least we make it look like it works.
True, but there is a huge power asymmetry. While advertisers do this day-in-day-out, and use all the latest psychological hacks they can get their hards on, regular people need to go about their day-to-day lives, with the usual daily struggles. That doesn't leave much time for education, which is sorely needed to not "be a sucker". Advertising is so damn slick these days.
Just wanted to clarify that I'm not blaming us for getting suckered in, it's more that everything we do, whether intentional or not, plays into it. It's a self-feeding beast; you go to a website and a dozen trackers pull your private data, send it off in sale, and somewhere down the line you get served an ad for self-sealing stembolts; advertisers call this a success and claim the system works. Accidentally fat-finger the ad on your phone? Amazing success!
Just about any time you touch a piece of technology, you send off data for the advertisers. Buy some fruit at the market and use your market card? Advertisers know. Or order something online from a "no name" shop? Advertisers know.
So it's not that we're guilty of anything but doing what we are expected to - it just it's costly.
The moment I saw this news about ads I uninstalled on the spot. It's dead to me now.
As an example of what I would consider ad hell, the film HYPER-REALITY https://vimeo.com/166807261 has been submitted several times with the most comments being https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11754564
One should be able to effectively do this with any franchise or property that people care about. How about "force ghosts" for Star Wars? Star Trek: The Next Generation style stealthed "observation posts?" (As in the "Who Watches the Watchers" episode. [1]) Chronicles of Narnia? Bleach? Any wish fulfillment where someone might have hoped against hope that the world in the book/movie was somehow real. Finding such properties isn't hard, as this wish fulfillment trope is widely used in fiction. (I wonder if an augmented reality gold rush is going to cause a "burn out" of this trope?)
[1] - http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Who_Watches_The_Watchers_...
The real question is how do businesses get their location in the game? My local is older than the USA so I can imagine how it's a point of interest, but your average high street store?
Maybe they could sell micro-lures that have a very limited proximity. Instead of being a broad region, you have to actually get very close to the shop.
Niantic's best move is to keep the hook baited for people who like the simple novelty of walking around to collect stuff and interacting with an augmented version of the real world and will casually integrate it into their life, like many have already done with fitness trackers. This kind of integration is now the gold standard for casual games - prepare to see a lot more apps/games with a GPS/maps component.
The biggest "gameplay" updates for PG aren't going to increase game system complexity, they're going to be more reasons for casual players to continue looking at their screens as they walk around (and gather in groups to continue to attract press attention). Random events, more stuff to collect, opportunities for personalization, a few buttons to press to casually influence the environment. The biggest updates will involve "business accounts" for those who want to own a piece of virtual property, advertise, attract players to a physical location, etc.
AR/GPS may well prove to be an awesome platform for "real", complex games, but Pokemon Go is not going to be one of them.
Why can't Niantic create an infrastructure for both groups? Trading would give both types of players a place in such a world.
I only learned that a month or two ago, it's quite handy.
Don't mind me, just trusting my observations...
I actually would hope that people don't always go to the same place regardless of advertising just so the activity is spread over different areas for varieties sake. Plus, having people keep going to the same space is going to annoy the neighbors.
And the developer should really have come up with a marketing strategy BEFORE releasing the game.
Nintendo did rather well releasing the game. Given the press, their marketing department is probably satisfied with their strategy and effort.