Also, if you look at Ingress, you always needed an invite to play, so when I finally got one everybody playing it was already so advanced that I could not see the fun in playing it.
For me it boils down to a few points:
* Pokemon Go is super simple to get started with
* The rules are easy to grasp
* You can play it casually
* It is light-hearted
Pokemon has a clearly defined goal which even the most casual player will easily understand: Catch all the Pokemons.
But in Ingress there is no universal goal which you _have_ to reach. It is open ended and you can do whatever you want to do. You can try to make tons of small fields, you can try to make very large fields, you can specialize in missions, ...
In order to really understand Ingress and all its different gamestyles you have to invest some time or you need a good mentor who teaches you all the basics.
Also Pokemon Go in it's current form is just a single player game in a multi player world. In contrast, Ingress is a true multi player game because there is much more player interaction due to attacking and defending portals.
Pokemon Go is not actually all that tied to a specific location. You need a few Pokestops nearby, but as long as the Pokemon spawn frequently enough around you you can play.
100% regarding Ingress, I tried so many times, and gave up.
Also the Field Trip app uses the same data if people want to find interesting things without Pokemon stuff.
The fact that anyone is at all surprised by the success of Pokemon Go is a testament to their ignorance of cultural phenomena they simply care to ignore.
Obviously the Pokémon brand is a draw, but ingress felt like a platform for a game that people had to construct. I got contacted by people who told me I needed to join these groups and talk in these IRC channels to have fun. I live in an area that's not so tech-savvy so there's few ingress points / Pokéstops but I can still walk over to the park and wander around some time through the few Pokéstops and gyms there are and have a lot of fun.
To me, ingress feels like an endless RPG quest where you have to retrieve items from various points. Sure, if you gather and co-ordinate efforts over the IRC channels and chat rooms I was invited to promising great depth you can create enough of a social element to make it pretty fun but I could be doing anything else.
With Pokémon Go, I feel confident to flip it out anywhere and gain a little bit of ingame development and fun that I can share with my friends, and I don't lose anything if I don't.
I went back to my normal routine instead of playing on my commute this morning.
Because it's good.
Define good however you want, go into a lot of detail on quality and the factors that make it good, but in the end, they got a lot of parts right and made something people like.