Even if Nintendo doesn't end up making much money out of the Pokemon Go game, the value of the mostly positive press that the company has received will certainly also affect positively product sales in the future.
I guess that's one perspective.
From a gamer's perspective, Pokemon Go has been a disaster so far. The app itself is pretty clunky and prone to freezing. The servers have been down for lengthy periods during prime hours. And, worst of all, they took a beloved franchise and essentially gutted it, which is a huge disappointment to everyone who's loved Pokemon since the '90s.
Casual gamers will be put off by the poor technical execution, and the core gaming audience will be repelled by its shallow, gimmicky gameplay. It has all the markings of a fad. Niantic better have some pretty massive updates up their sleeve...
Not at all. It is a similar experience to the launch of any MMO game. Any gamer will recognize the symptoms and wait a bit. As for casual gamers, they are casually playing it and barely notice the issues. They play the game one hour a day. If one day the app is not working they simply do something else and try the next day. I have not experienced downtimes that lasted more than one day.
In my small town, there is still hundred of people playing. When I go to the public area I can see kids running around playing with teenagers and adults along with some elderly.
To be honest, I have never seen this town so alive. Normally this area would be almost empty. I would go there to play music on the public benches because I knew that I would not be disturbed. This week the place was filled with people every day.
The only difference is pokemon go is in the real world. And that is an insane difference.
I have played WoW on the launch day of a new expansion -- in 2010. I experienced a single problem: mob respawn times appeared to decrease as the population of a zone increased, which meant that it was nearly impossible to complete certain quests because the mob respawn time was only a couple of seconds. (The particular quest I'm thinking of involved looting something the mobs dropped, which used a timed progress bar and was interrupted (and canceled) if you took a hit while looting.)
When was the last time you played WoW on an expansion launch?
I think mobs is a regular problem, and good for Pokemon for making other people's capture not make a pokemon disappear which effectively solved any mob spawning problems.
So like every other non-core Pokémon game? People forget almost every non-core game aside from Stadium has bombed or gone unnoticed.
I'm not worried about Nintendo as much as I am worried about Niantic. Nintendo will make tons of money again this year with Sun and Moon and I am sort of suspicious GO will get that game a couple more sales (I personally will get it because of GO bringing back my interest). It seems Nintendo can release and re-lease anything Pokémon related and make a profit. They recently put the original three games (Red, Blue, and Yellow) on the 3DS virtual store with the ability to transfer your Pokémon from there to Sun and Moon (crazy!) and probably made some good money even if that cost almost nothing to do.
Niantic is the company that has something to prove and the way they handle the new few months will be crucial.
Really? Pokemon Mystery Dungeon appears to be on its 6th game.
I disagree. Nintendo is absolutely trying to reestablish itself and its many IPs. With this shift toward mobile/AR Pokemon stands to be the killer app that sells VR/AR in a few years time. I do agree that the execution of the release was a nightmare. It lacks features and is reliably unreliable. Niantic\Nintendo should not haved rushed the release to coincide with summer and simply waited a year.
"Oh I wish Pokemon were real! I could run around and catch them! Get strong and battle other people.. I would totally be like Ash/Red and travel around the country to catch a rare Pokemon and beat the gyms!" - Thought every Pokemon player that has ever existed
Compound 20 years of interest in a Pokemon MMO and this is the result. Even though Pokemon Go has only the tiniest fraction of the features we envisioned for this MMO. Even though we have to live that reality through a two dimensional screen rather than in the Matrix like we would've preferred. Even though the majority of the time there are issues and we can't get access. Even though it takes way to long to grind up. Even though the experience is a grind rather than an adventure.
If you tap into a human's imagination, find out what they have wanted and promise "that is where we are headed!", you could release almost any resemblance to it and have that human hooked. If you find a product like this which targets multiple generations of humans, then you're golden.
Even look at other games like Dwarf Fortress. People put up with huge UX issues inorder to stimulate their childhood Lord of the Rings fantasies. The same with World of Warcraft when it came out.
My thoughts as well. It already favours players who play obsessively. Casual gamers can't really expect to ever challenge a gym in even a reasonably populated area. I was excited by the idea and I lost interest after a few days. No guarantee that everyone else will follow suit, but I have that sort of gut feeling.
With how terrible the gym metagame is right now, casual players can absolutely take on a gym.
I placed a pretty decent Jolteon in one and my lower-leveled Wife pretty much beat the crap out of it with a Vaporeon.
Right now: Vaporeon rules the streets.
There's a great post about why this is right now on /r/TheSilphRoad: https://redd.it/4tylty
But I do concur - it is looking like it will be a fad. They will have to pump updates and new features into it in order to keep it alive, or it will die quick. Already 2/6 (of my) office workers have dropped from playing it.
This is the reason I generally stick to games with good single player campaigns. On rare occasions I'll play multiplayer with friends. But I think the last online multiplayer game I played with strangers was Left 4 Dead. I was always either booted from the game early on because I didn't play "correctly" or I received a "guided tour" by someone who had put 1000 hours into it. Just playing the game wasn't really an option, apparently.
I agree with the sibling that favoring obsessive players is par for the course with MMOs (or those who spend the most $$, which I refuse to do).
That said, I'm playing Pokemon GO (at nearly 40 years old) because it's just fun to collect the Pokemon, level up, and socialize with other players. I really don't care about taking over a gym. I can play this without competing with those people who have 40 hours a week to throw away on it. My social group largely seems to feel the same way, although a few are obsessive. And while I'm fairly active already, it has encouraged me to be more active.
As for whether it's a fad, it might be. Normally with free-to-play games I lose interest as soon as it becomes ridiculously difficult to rank up. With this, I think I'll start to lose interest when the rest of my social group loses interest. I think, for me, Pokemon Go is more likely to be replaced by something similar than just abandon out of lack of interest, though.
Even if the servers were dealing with two orders of magnitude less volume, the app would still be an incredibly brittle piece of code, ceasing to respond to taps, locking up after a capture, and otherwise falling over at the slightest server latency. It's a distant cry from the kind of polished retail builds that come out of first-party Nintendo studios like EAD.
If you want to experience the variety of pokemon this game offers, you're incentivized to sit and stay.