Apple says Pokémon Go is the most downloaded app in its first week ever | Hacker News Reader

Apple says Pokémon Go is the most downloaded app in its first week ever

techcrunch.com

422 pointsdoppp210 comments

Shows you just how much pent up demand there was for Nintendo to release games on mobile.

Getting a huge first week download count is a lot easier when you have literally decades of brand recognition. Being a free download certainly didn't hurt either.

It remains to be seen what the customer retention numbers look like. I saw some absolutely insane projections earlier this week about how Apple and Nintendo were going to make billions off of Pokemon Go. I don't see how they're going to sustain the current game as it gets fairly grindy and there isn't much to do once you've caught them all. Maybe some compelling new features will be added to keep players from getting bored? Direct peer to peer battles and possibly trading for example.

Honestly, those compelling new features need to come soon. I've only caught maybe 50% of the catalog, and it's already getting really grindy. It's a LOT harder to pull users back onto the platform once they've left than it is to keep them enticed while they're already on. I predict something like a 70% dropoff rate for users over the next 30 days unless they release something shiny and new[0]

[0] Purely anecdotal, but based on multiple contacts already getting bored enough to uninstall

I've already stopped playing... I was at level 23 and with well over 50% caught, and I still had no chance of winning local gyms. It's not engaging unless I can compete, and I wasn't willing to heavily grind on a casual game just to fight random people.

I realized Pokemon Go was just a "background activity" for hanging out with friends... and I'd rather focus on the people.

I'll jump back in as soon as they added trading and player vs player.

In my experience, people who hold down gyms are high schoolers or college students out for the summer. Hard to compete with them when they have free summers!

I loved the card game.. because it didn't matter if you had the most expensive cards, or grinded through levels. It all depended on strategy. The card game was what Pokemen Go should have emulated, not the Gameboy one.

To be fair, it didn't really emulate the gameboy one either. Very different gameplay.

Well, it doesn't really emulate the gameboy game either, so noone wins.

I got discouraged by the inability to load the app and it crashing while I was trying to capture Pokemon I didn't have in my collection so I just uninstalled the game.

This happened constantly to me as well, but not the last couple of days, but now it seems to crash when I "sleep" it by holding my phone upside down. Sometimes it doesn't wake up again and sometimes touch doesn't work after I wake it up. But it's not a huge inconvenience.

Did you figure out how to dodge? The battling system is designed to make it fairly easy for a lower level set of pokemon to take over a gym, especially in a group. But you have to understand the dodging mechanic (swiping when an attack is signaled by a yellow flash).

Yeah, I've had little problem taking gyms by just doing repeated attacks - you just have to get the prestige down to zero, so 1 or 2 weaker people with enough revives can pretty much clean house. Holding the gyms is the hard part I think.

When I first heard that multiple players can fight in the same gym battle instance, I got excited with the hope that there might be the conventional raid versus boss combat mechanics present - a main tank, positioning being important, taunts and so on.

Of course gym battles are a lot more simple and fixing the many issues both combat-wise and in general take priority compared to adding such mechanics in.

It's also very difficult to design for mobile devices - not due to processor or screen size, but due to unavoidable latency spikes on LTE. You'd essentially need an in-universe explanation to reconcile conflict resolution with user expectation. "But my move registered and I stunned that guy, but he still killed me!"

An author of another real-world game, Cheapshot here.

It's not an issue, LTE is fast enough. For multiplayer we take into account every bullet and sync dozens of players in real time.

That's strange. I'm not that player level and I still easily take down the highest gyms I've seen, which are level 6-7. As long as you can beat the weakest monster in the gym you can attack over and over until the prestige is low enough that there is only one monster in the gym. At that point it is easy to defeat even a 2,500CP Dragonite with 6 crappy Gobats since you have 6 shots to wear him down.

The only limiting factor for taking down gyms for me is the number of potions I have. I usually only fight with half dead monsters so I can use revives instead, then I use potions for the one that I put in as a defender to conserve potions.

I think what the OP means by winning is keeping control of the gym, to your point exactly.

I am also at level 23 and can take out pretty much any gym. But right when I walk out of range, someone half my level using either a full six roster or type advantage or both will boot me out. When the game came out I could maybe stay in control of a gym for a day but now it has not exceeded half an hour so I no longer try.

There is no keeping gyms. The game is seeing how many you can grab before you cash in your rewards.

I think this is a nice change from ingress, where there was very little a low level player could do about a high level portal.

Indeed. Few days ago I took over a gym on my way to work. I thought, hey, there's another gym right next to the office. I'm not going to be greedy, I'll just take that other one and cash in. I don't think I made it to the tram stop 5 minutes down the road before someone took that previous gym back...

Level 23? How many hours did you put in that?

In the city, it's not hard to find a spot with 2 lures going, and i'm sure you can find places with 3. Lucky eggs double the xp for any action. evolving nets 500, with the egg, 1000. You get a few lucky eggs as awards as you level. You can get around 60 evolutions while the lucky egg is active.

Level 20 is sort of the "soft max". beyond that it's very expensive to progress further. It's 210,000 total XP for level 20. 435,000 total for level 23.

Realistically, say 4 hours of catching at those lured sites buys you enough for the 60 evolutions, 60,000 xp. Let's go with 5 hours total.

Perfect conditions, i think that comes out to 35 hours. I'd say double or perhaps triple that realistically. You have to go gather loot and stuff, which still grants XP, just at a slower rate. If the OP felt like it, running the whole time with lucky eggs would cut that down quite a bit, maybe half, and cost perhaps $20. I'm guessing around 80 hours without buying anything.

A single person who's interested in it can pretty easily come up with 3 hours a day, and quite a few hours on the weekend. 30 hours seems pretty accessible. it's been out for 2 weeks or so now, so the OP is only a little on the high side. Perhaps not at all if they'd spent money on eggs.

Of course, different people have different commitments. In a rural area, this would be impossible. Family, hobbies, a long commute would drastically reduce the time available. But if your hobby is video games, it's pretty easy to swap one for another with little effort.

I took maybe a week to get to level 10 just casually playing walking to and from work... jumped the last 10 by grinding for one day and learning how to use the lucky eggs.

> I realized Pokemon Go was just a "background activity" for hanging out with friends... and I'd rather focus on the people.

There's something to that. I pass many players daily on my way to work, and I see them more often in groups (usually friends, sometimes couples) than alone. I've read somewhere recently that it's also turning into a way to ask someone out / handle a date, and personally I know one girl I could easily ask out by suggesting we go Pokemon hunting...

I have heard that is a thing from a couple people now.

It is frankly, a bad game that doesn't have much going for it outside the "It's Pokemon" and giving you a reason to go outside.

It is completely devoid of skill and rewards only having a higher level. The game isn't even pay-to-win or skill-to-win.

It's win-to-win-to-win.

If a person knows anything about the mechanics of the game they know casual players (and most adults) are simply not able to compete with lvl 25 school kids who can devote 6+ hrs a day to this game.

I'd rather play games where I can beat opponents with skill, not grinding.

The grind honestly ends at about level 20 right now. Once you get a few good attackers, you will always be able to take any gym you want.

The problem now is that holding gyms is impossible. I can never have more than 1 because the time it takes to drive to the nearest gym and capture it is less than the time it takes for somebody else to retake a gym.

Geography bias is a real problem. Some areas have several gyms in walking distance, others have miles in-between gyms.

That's basically how it is with the game's predecessor, Ingress. I'm lucky to live in an area dense with portals within a short drive. Some areas we've played in were so sparse there was no point in trying to capture, link, and field it.

Although, length of link and area of field got you more points, so there was some inducement to find open or poorly defended portals that are off the beaten path, in hopes of holding a large field. Portals at mountain summits and the like are often hotly contested. Of course you still have to be in the general area, but there is absolutely no point to venturing to out of the way gyms in POGo.

For the hardcore players with money to burn on traveling, sure. There was a player in our area who booked a flight to Hawaii literally just to field over the western half of the continent. There's also the risk/reward of holding an out of the way Guardian portal, even though it's easy to achieve that badge with a local portal too.

I don't think the creators of the game envisioned that kind of dedication, though. And you're right, that is a fundamental difference between Pokemon GO (which despite the claims of its older players, is definitely targeted at teens and children) and Ingress.

Players in my area have successfully crowd funded flights, including charter flights, for our most hardcore players.

You're "competing" against and playing with those within your geography though.It's an issue for those that want to be posting impressive screenshots on reddit/forums that live in the suburbs sure but outside of that minority most people are interacting with players that have similar opportunities to them.

Except you are not, as the bots have already taken over :-(

> win-to-win-to-win.

That basically describes every roguelike and JRPG ever. At best they provide a tediously complicated skill tree or bizarre counter structure that gives you some trivia to explore and memorize to provide an illusion of skill, but fundamentally a massive chunk of modern gaming is "kill stuff, increment power"

If you're not dying at least once or twice every time you play a game it's too easy. Resident Evil demonstrated this to me (the early games). One of the most perfectly balanced games between challenging thoughtful puzzles and survival combat skills. Especially for kids/youth.

This theory could go a long way in explaining the slow death of World of Warcraft. Blizzard can make as much end-game content as they want but the fact remains that the average new player starting out is faced with 12 years worth of content that is so ridiculously easy that there's a very real chance they will go through it all without dying once.

Those not dying at least once have clearly never experienced the wonder that's auto-matchmaking 5-man instance dungeons.

If anything, WoW's big problem is that an average new player starting out is faced with 12 years worth of content they have to rush through to get to max level endgame, where the vast majority of in-game social life occurs. The innate incentives of experiencing the storyline and zones doesn't compete favorably with the huge social incentive of wanting to join your friends at endgame as quickly as possible.

In WoW, just any zone-leveled game, old content quickly becomes obsolete once it's superseded with newer content, and only delivers a fraction of its original value.

Pokemon GO doesn't have this problem (for the simple reason of tying their in-game geography to real-world geography), but also has a very shallow gameplay where the novelty will wear off quickly. If they can expand gameplay mechanics quickly before players abandon it, they may have a sustained hit.

> Those not dying at least once have clearly never experienced the wonder that's auto-matchmaking 5-man instance dungeons.

urm, tanks can solo the 5 man dungeons, so it doesnt really matter what the rest of the group does anymore...

JRPG's yes, roguelikes no (or at least not the "pure" ones like ADOM, Brogue, DCSS, Nethack, etc. which have permadeath and require a good deal of skill).

Maybe you meant MMORPGs and JRPGs? Because MMORPGs tend to fit to that template.

I mean the grind "RPG without a plot" such as Diablo where there's only difficulty when you hit a level cap or you try to rush the game, but for most players it's "grind until you're OP then kill boss".

Pokemon go is incredibly friendly to casual players. everybody gets everything. The only place where players interact via the game is at gym battles which are heavily heavily biased toward the attacker. Level 15, perhaps even level 10 can take down anything, given enough potions and revives.

If nothing else, Niantic learned from Ingress. High level players have high level stuff, sure. But 6 v 1 ensures even the most casual player can make progress. You don't have that level bonus wall to climb that you have in other games.

It wasn't so friendly for me. I took my kids out Pokemon hunting in the car and we drove around for a while looking for one. My son was traumatized when we drove over a pidgee. I'm never doing that again!

Isn't the idea to walk?

I live in a city centre, and there are families walking past all day, with kids looking at phones. And plenty of kids walking alone or in groups.

If any city counts pedestrians, or would be interesting to see what difference Pokémon has caused.

I don't play by the rules of the game.

I guess don't be surprised when your strategy doesn't work out?

I dunno, I got an amusing anecdote out of it and got a rise out of you.

I gave up because I didn't know that was the case. Nothing in the game indicates it's like that - all I knew was that my Pokemon had far less power than the ones in my local gyms. I suspect most casual players will be similar as the game tells you very little about how to get the most out of it.

> If a person knows anything about the mechanics of the game they know casual players (and most adults) are simply not able to compete with lvl 25 school kids who can devote 6+ hrs a day to this game.

Don't underestimate anybody. There are 40-olds working full-time who can devote 6+ hrs a day to games.

if that was true it would be a good version of real Pokemon. every single Pokemon game was about grinding and luck. if you think any of the franchise game was about skill you're insane.

> I realized Pokemon Go was just a "background activity" for hanging out with friends... and I'd rather focus on the people.

I wouldn't underestimate the value of a game mechanic for getting people to hang out. Many board games are basically just background activities, but there an excuse to get together.

That said, if it is a background activity, it should be a background-able app -- i.e. notify me when certain Pokemon are close but otherwise leave me alone. I find it much less exhausting to have an app that requires my attention for only 15 minutes a day.

As far as I know, you can't access the GPS from an unfocused app on either iOS or Android. You can ask the OS to set up a geofence and then get called back when the user enters it, but if what you care about isn't so much where the user is as the fact that they're moving around, the OS doesn't have anything to offer you.

I would think that to be false based n sports trackers. Or do they work in some different manner that's not suitable here?

On iOS, when location updates are engaged via CLLocationManager#startUpdatingLocation (assuming all required permissions are in-place, eg NSLocationAlwaysAuthorization, UIBackgroundModes), an iOS app will remain running in background indefinitely until #stopUpdatingLocation is executed, when iOS will immediately put the app to sleep.

I don't know if this is true, because my android phone helpfully pops up my grocery rewards card in a notification while I'm walking through the store with my phone locked and 0 apps open.

I don't know whether Android has adopted the same protocol, but on iOS, that's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBeacon: basically an API where apps can register an OS event-handler plugin to run in response to the detection of [basically, but not exactly] specific Bluetooth MACs.

The scary thing is, iBeacon handler don't have to do the cute "hey you're in this store, click to open the app!" sort of thing. They can run completely in the background, just reporting "hey boss, they're in the shoe section of Store #3313 now! Now they're in the produce section! Now they're gone." And, as far as I know, there's no way to turn off the tracking behaviour while keeping the helpful "activation suggestion" behaviour.

On iOS an app can ask to access the GPS from the background. You can allow or deny that request, and if you go into the settings you can set its GPS permissions to never, always, only when running

yes, you can. I created a plugin for Cordova/React Native/NativeScript that does this:

https://github.com/transistorsoft/cordova-background-geoloca...

https://github.com/transistorsoft/react-native-background-ge...

Here I am driving around Iceland with my sample app, completely in background. Tracking engages automatically when device is detected to be moving.

http://www.transistorsoft.com/lab/iceland

The fitness app [Human](http://human.co/) sits in the background and provide a map of where the user has moved throughout the day, and a timeline of when they moved (for example, that there was a walk from 10-10:30 AM, a jog from 2-:2:14, etc). When apps like this are backgrounded, the iOS permission dialog asks if the user wants to allow the app to continue using their location in the background.

I have no idea what APIs they use, so I'm not sure how hard it is to get this information, but it is at least possible.

How do these games prevent location spoofing? Or do they?

Ingress has some heuristics, but is not infallible. Plenty of cheaters have figured out how to avoid detection.

It is fairly clear that there are no such heuristics in PoGo.

The reality is, Niantic is a small company, and does not have the resources to throw at detecting/banning/dealing with the appeals.

welcome to the pay to win era.

also i bet most of what everyone read about this game at first was paid for; people downloaded based on those initial false articles, see the bugs, uninstall, or even play like you did and gave up when you notice the pay to win scheme. but regardless, the app already made it to the download top lists and now they're even getting real news coverage everywhere.

this has nothing to do with people wanting Nintendo games on mobile. it's just a forced marketing fad like any other we always had since the 80s.

Do non-tech demographics delete unused apps or just let them pile up on their phone? It seems to me the biggest barrier to entry is getting people to go to an app store and make the initial download, in which case getting them to come back wouldn't be all that hard with a well marketed upgrade assuming the app is still there.

> It's a LOT harder to pull users back onto the platform once they've left than it is to keep them enticed while they're already on.

Then again, I imagine it's a lot easier to pull prior users back than it is to find new ones, so in that respect, they're already ahead of everyone.

> Maybe some compelling new features will be added to keep players from getting bored? Direct peer to peer battles and possibly trading for example.

You mean actually make it a pokemon game?

That's crazy talk.

(and I want to train up my team too)

Pokemon Go has shattered every record (downloads, engagement, revenue, etc). It's not just downloads.

"there isn't much to do once you've caught them all"

This an extremely short-sighted comment. The developers created a digital world they can modify at will. They can add any number of items to collect, add mini games within the game, create new quests, etc. The possibilities are literally endless.

They better add those things really, really soon, before the userbase gets bored. Because right now, there isn't much to do once you've caught them all.

Anyone who quits after playing through the entire game in a week will be immediately crawling back as soon as the next new feature is released.

You've just described a decade of dead in the water MMOs. Which isn't to say you're wrong, just that very few manage to capitalize on the opportunity.

Happened to me with Final Fantasy XIV. 2.0 was great but since 3.0 came out there really hasn't been much content to keep me hanging around. I let my sub lapse and have no real desire to get back in until I can log in for a few months and play a nice burst of content.

"Short-sighted" if you're describing a product as what it is today and not what it can be in the future? Having the ability to do something and doing it right now are two different things.

As things stand, the statement "there isn't much to do once you've caught them all" is pretty on point, not short-sighted.

> The possibilities are literally endless.

Yeah, but no one plays games for possibilities. Will Niantic actually be able to deliver fast enough?

You see this effect on Kickstarter also. The people who stand the best chance of funding large projects on kickstarter are people who have already proven their abilities outside of that format.

Pokémon Go is real genius in its combination of 3 elements that make it like lazing a stick of dynamite.

    1) You can walk around in immersive play
    2) There's opportunity for face to face interaction. 
    3) It's IP that a large part of the public cares about.

Of these, it's #1 that's the most critical. It's like the world is the world of Pokemon and you're a character in it like Ash.

I disagree. The most critical part is #3. Were this not Pokemon hardly anyone would care.

Don't know much about Ingress but didn't it have #1 and #2 already..?

Yes, it did. The classic problem for geographically-based mobile games is critical mass. Ingress barely reaches the necessary threshold. Pokemon IP was critical here.

I don't know, ingress seems to be pretty active at least where I live.

is it "most downloaded app in the first week" active? Definitely 3 IMHO

It's active enough, but if you watch trends even one or two additional players in a big city is enough to make a significant difference in the overall team battles.

Similarly, I used to live in San Francisco and my team recently hit 54 winning septicycles in a row -- that's over a year of weekly victories. While we're good players, we're not that good. It's problematic if one team can establish that degree of dominance in one of the most tech-oriented cities in the world.

(Brooklyn had a similar streak the other way.)

And since Ingress never monetized in the top couple of hundred apps, there's no way it is/was profitable.

Been playing for about a year and a half... It seems to me that team balance has always been affected in multiple almost independent ways. Obviously if a new player knows a current player, that will bias their team selection significantly. The part that concerns me is the completely new player, who just found out about the game and decided to give it a try, is asked to choose sides permanently with no indications which side might be better or worse in any way. My choice of Resistance was mostly because I like blue better... glad I chose how I did but I had no idea when I started.

Indeed. I loved Ingress, and I felt more comfortable with that world. But it was nerdy by design. Pokémon, on the other hand, is something everyone has at least heard about - and it doesn't give off that "nerd" vibe. Hence immediate mainstream adoption.

I disagree. The most critical part is #3. Were this not Pokemon hardly anyone would care.

However if it were absent all AR/VR immersion aspects, it wouldn't be nearly as big either, just another Pokemon game. Maybe the critical part is the combination of #1 and #3?

Yeah, I was thinking about that. The thing about Pokemon and Nintendo is that demand for a good mobile game was always there.

I do think that we will be seeing a lot more AR in the future as a result of this.

AR is almost non-existant in this game. It's a semantic abuse to call overlaying an animated Pokémon on top of your camera stream "AR". It's also something you quickly learn to turn off, as it makes catching Pokémon much more difficult. For some weird reason though, mainstream media has sticked to hyping up the "AR revolution" in games.

AR is almost non-existant in this game. It's a semantic abuse to call overlaying an animated Pokémon on top of your camera stream "AR"

It's enough. There's just enough AR to facilitate the game of "let's pretend." You could've also have said that there's barely any 3D in Eve Online fleet combat. Advanced players would zoom out all the way, set graphics to minimum, and play entirely with the "Overview" table. (Hence Excel Spreadsheet In Spaaaace!) Yet no one would say that Eve Online isn't a 3D video game world. It's enough to have something that frames the real world as a fantasy world come to life, and let you walk around in it. That's the key: The effect on the user. Not how primitive or slick the technology is.

Heck, you know what the Asteroids screen looks like. That was enough to give people the feeling of piloting a combat spaceship. Yet it's really nothing like actual outer space at all. Granted this stuff will get better, but it's good to note how the most primitive mechanics make people feel. Then take that knowledge of the essence of the experience into the future with slicker AR graphics.

Fair enough. I haven't thought about it that way. Yeah, even Pokémon Go sometimes managed to get me to feel that a particular Pokémon is actually sitting there in the real world. It would probably happen much more often if not for the sorry state of GPS and orientation sensors in even top-tier smartphones.

That said, I think I get most of the "virtual/real reality mixing" feeling from the geographical aspect. In Ingress, I quickly started to feel as if the portals were a real, but invisible, part of my city. I'm starting to get something like it with Pokéstops. The important thing here seems to be persistence and non-randomness of that particular game world aspect.

I think people talking about AR are referring to the way gyms, stops, and monster spawns are overlaid on real world locations.

Same as with the game's predecessor, Ingress - that had no "camera overlay" elements at all, but it's pretty universally described as an AR game.

there isn't much to do once you've caught them all

True, but how long does it take to actually catch'em all? Because I've been playing for 10 days, at maybe 1-2 hours per day on average, I've caught 46 out of 151 pokémon, and it gradually gets harder and harder to catch new ones due to their different rarities. This means that it might take (me) 100-200 hours to catch'em all, which is not bad for a game and especially for a mobile game.

And then, they have 5 more generations of Pokémon that they can add, to a total of 746. Plus trading, direct PvP, etc.

The challenge is to fix the server issues, crashes and problems like the 3-step bug before too many users get annoyed and leave. But if they do that, I think their playerbase can last quite long.

You probably won't catch about 1/4 of the pokemon, you'll evolve them. This is where hatching eggs is really important, because each egg gives you a lot more candy than catching wild versions of the same monsters, and you need a decent amount of candy to evolve the higher level ones.

If they ever get trading working it would be a lot easier to fill out the last few holes in the roster.

Although the hugely successful casual mobile games are, in fact, extremely grindy. Candy Crush Saga is nothing but a grind at high levels, with minimally complex gameplay.

The question isn't whether Pokemon Go will keep my interest. I'm not a typical mobile game consumer, and most of us here probably aren't. I think the core compulsion loop is a little bit thin without quite enough variety or randomness, but I'm not confident enough to make predictions.

The Achilles heel (if there is one) is that the game is not something you can pick up and play whenever you happen to have a free moment. You have to be able to get up and go for a walk. Candy crush et al. can be played on the bus, in the restroom, in a meeting, on the couch, etc.

That must depend on where you live. I've caught quite a few Pokemon from my couch.

In particular, it depends on your GPS quality and signal-proofness of your walls. From my home, I get weak enough reception that my character often runs circles around the neighbouring blocks, sometimes even getting close to the Pokéstop down the street...

Also, bus is a perfect venue to play the game. Personally, half of my game activity is logged on a tram.

> Also, bus is a perfect venue to play the game.

When I accidentally get stuck on a bus in rush our, Pokémon Go makes that much more tolerable---if the servers aren't having rush hour trouble.

It depends on where you live, but that in and of itself is a flaw -- ideally the game wouldn't be less fun for people who don't live in cities/large towns.

My work is right by a Pokestop so I just turn it on to collect Pokeballs and dump a bunch of potions & revives.

I don't think the games flaw is making people walk around. That's what makes it unique plus the AR part. I think the flaw with Pokemon Go is trying to keep people interested, just like every other game.

They need to add some aspect to the game that is playable at home.

An 11 year old kid can't go out at night and catch Pokemon on their own, but they sure as heck can sit at home playing games.

I'm an old man but I do most of my game playing from bed at night and in the morning (terrible habit I know) and so does my wife. I'd love to be able to add Pokemon to my daily games rotation but right now I can't.

I think I’d disagree. There’s no shortage of games you can play at home; with or without friends, online or off. And it’ll have a much more difficult time competing with them, because it’s a surprisingly shallow game.

But getting the same 11yo to spend his weekends in the park instead of on the couch .. that’s a turning point we’ve been missing for years.

Is this the children's fault, or adult's? What I mean is, do children play ball sports, or skateboard, or just generally hang out on playscapes anymore? I remember fondly of just messing around in wooded areas and stinking like high heaven like pond scum upon my return.

I suspect I'm the wrong person to answer that, having very little exposure to today's children.

Over the span of my youth (I'm 34, so consider this 80s-90s) I lived the transition from building forts in the woods and rafts on the rivers (never went well, never stopped us trying) to arguing over who's turn it was on the playstation.

Now I read articles about "free-range children" and parents getting in trouble for even letting them walk to school, and .. I realise I'm biased by my inputs (no-one writes articles saying "hey, nothing's changed"), but it seems like this is a different era. And damnit, I'm not old enough to call things eras yet.

But it does seem the 'mobile' has been missing in 'mobile gaming'. We've built an entire industry on "always available gaming" or "something to stare at on the subway gaming", but it's taken 34yo men playing what's basically an easter-egg hunt, to remind us what 'mobile' actually means.

In my early 20s. But my experience was that kids balanced "outsideness" and "insideness". Maybe one day you'd sit around on the PlayStation for six hours. The next you would bike out to the woods.

I think most kids still intrinsically like the outdoors-- there is a lot of cool stuff out there.

Why not pick up one of the mainline Pokemon games?

Die-hard gamers will burn out quick but the minor attention investment required combined with the game-ification of recreational walking will keep games like this one popular for a very long time.

We're not dealing with people sitting and staring at a screen anymore. The game changes with the weather.

> Shows you just how much pent up demand there was for Nintendo to release games on mobile.

Does it? My impression is that there's a lot more people playing Pokemon Go than there are Pokemon fans. The IP no doubt helped, but I don't think that you can just release any Nintendo IP on mobile and instantly have the massive virality success of Pokemon Go. There's something more to it than that.

Yea, count me as one. I have literally never played any Pokemon game before, and half-caught maybe one episode of some TV show featuring some comical evil cat villain thing.

But, I'm catching pokemon on my walk to/from work (makes it less boring, and doesn't make it take any longer). My wife is now dragging me to the park every other day to run around in circles catching pokemon.

I'd be interested to see some survey results on what percentage of people playing this are actually pokemon fans.

1. We know pokemon is a powerful phenomenon people get hooked onto. 2. You were previously not a fan of that phenomenon. 3. You now started liking that phenomenon. 4. The survey would show how many people started playing because they were hooked onto the phenomenon already.

I'm not a fan of Pokemon but I'm playing it now and then just to see what this thing everyone's fascinated by is.

Same here. Early 50s - played a bit - find the whole thing quite interesting.

I believe the high viral factor comes from going outside and seeing tons of people playing it and talking to strangers about it. That vitality has nothing to do with Pokemon specifically, but it's a factor that doesn't kick unless the game gets really big really quickly. And I think that initially enormous reception has to be largely credited to the IP.

I think any Nintendo IP would do well from the brand itself. But you're right. Pokemon Go is different. As someone who once obsessed with Pokemon 20 years ago, this game is like living a childhood dream. I'm pretty sure many other like me are what drove the initial traction. Social media did the rest.

Hell, it hasn't even released in Japan yet.

It was released in Japan today.

Technically, yesterday. Since it is Saturday here in Japan. I played Friday lunchtime and saw many others doing so.

Ah! Time zones are tough. I read a news article saying it was released about 12 hours ago; I should have guessed that it wouldn't have _literally_ been at the time the article came out.

Pokemon emulators have been available on mobile for a very long time. While I agree with most of what you're saying I think the phenomenon is more complex then just throwing something on the app store finally.

Yes, especially since MiiTomo is out since months and nobody cared.

Billions? Certainly not. The game's fad will be over at the end of summer. Nobody is going to stay outside in parks by -10C.

Plus, the game is constantly crashing, draining battery, crashing again when the network goes down. It's been almost 3 weeks and they don't have fixed a single bug, and it's not like they're hard to reproduce or complex to understand where they come from. They literally didn't test their code before pushing it to the outside. It's not "Hard to scale" when you don't do things like "no caching client side", "mutate states concurrently without write ack". Come on, man.

You're definitely mistaken that they haven't fixed a single bug. Server stability has greatly improved and the number of times the game freezes while trying to catch pokemon has dropped significantly.

Yeah, no startup could ever duplicate this success. For HN purposes the fact that it's the most downloaded app in a week is sort of a meaningless data point. There's nothing instructive here that any other company on earth could use to have similar success.

The fact that nobody here had even mentioned MiiTomo which came out on iOS months ago says a lot. It's not that just any Nintendo franchise is desired it's this particular game and franchise.

When someone told me that Pokemon Go was exploding, I looked into it, and got really excited about its concept. People getting outside, interacting though a long-loved game, using real landmarks to denote checkpoints, playing a localized "king of the hill" type minigame. The architecture behind it and it really feels like it's using bleeding edge VR push us into a more social and fun world.

That said, I also feel like it's equally the biggest missed opportunity to date. Usually, I just see players walking, heads down, not talking. It was downright eerie when I was downtown one Tuesday night at midnight, and it was dead quiet despite ~60 Pokemon players meandering about. They should have introduced PvP earlier (hopefully it's around the corner!), and better yet, make it so you get more exp for battling people you haven't battled before. Spur people into social interaction!

I think they've solved the battle mechanics very elegantly by avoiding direct PvP, likely on purpose, to prevent too many real-world confrontations escalating.

My experience (being on a college campus, however dead it may be during the summer) has been the opposite. People who otherwise wouldn't talk to each other are openly walking up to each other to talk about Pokemon Go.

A coworker of mine and his girlfriend have also started hanging out (as in, indoors and double dating by not playing Pokemon together) with another couple they met while hunting for Pokemon.

You know that one mobile "space pilot" game? The one where everyone's phone displays different elements of a fictional spacecraft, with buttons labeled "Power Overdrive" and knobs and levers to pull with crazy names? And players get instructions they need to shout to other players, like "Whoever has the Neutrino Ray, set it to 4!"

Basically, the game forces one big fun social interaction by requiring players to exchange information to stay alive.

How could this work with Pokemon Go? I don't know. Currently the only social exchanges are "There's a Blastoise over here!" (which is pretty darn cool). But maybe more could be done. Some type of puzzle where one person in an area is designated the "Puzzle leader," and gets to rely information to other people...

The name of that game is Spaceteam, by the way

Ooo! You're talking about Spaceteam I presume?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sleepingbe...

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spaceteam/id570510529?mt=8

I'm confused by the title. Is PoGo the first app to reach x downloads in the first week of release, or is it the most downloaded app of all time, just one week after release? Slow internet won't let me view the article.

Of all apps that have been released, Pokemon Go has more downloads during the first week than any other app had during the first week.

"While the game was only available in a few countries at the time, the app has attracted more downloads in the App Store during its first week than any other app in App Store history."

That probably mean that hey had more downloads then any other app's first week but it could also mean more downloads then any other app since their initial release?

Quote from the article: "... the app has attracted more downloads in the App Store during its first week than any other app in App Store history."

That's still ambiguous.

I see these two interpretations:

    1. Pokemon Go has more downloads during its first week than any other app has had during its own first week.

    2. Pokemon Go has more downloads during its first week than any other app has had in its entire existence.

The first seems much more probable. Honestly the second isn't even reasonable when you consider apps like Facebook. Facebook has more users and more possible downloads because their app also works on tablets.

Update: I don't disagree with you. It seems all articles have used the same (possibly intentionally) ambiguous quote.

Agreed the headline is terrible and very confusing with the "ever" tacked on the end.

Something like "Apple says Pokemon Go is the most downloaded app ever, after just one week," would have been much more clear, IMO.

which is the 2nd most downloaded app?

Agreed that it's ambiguous. Better would have been "Pokemon Go achieved the all-time highest one-week downloads".

This game has become a victim of its own success. Niantic has be strangely silent about bugs and server outages. I foresee a massive drop in interest soon.

I keep seeing these comments foretelling the "inevitable" doomsday from the development community. This is a surprising sentiment. What Pokemon Go has shown, regardless of its future success, is a new ceiling for mobile app virality.

Also notable is that people always cite the issues as the reason for failure. But these issues have affected the app since day 0. Pokemon Go is having this success despite its technical flaws. Further evidence that building the right product trumps building a flawless product.

I say flip the narrative. What Pokemon Go has shown is that a product that fills a burning desire can achieve what seems like unprecedented success levels, quickly. The app doesn't need to be perfect. It needs to be something people want.

I've been playing since day one and I've already lost interest. Most everyone I've spoken to is of the same thinking. It was fun at the beginning but there is simply not enough substance in the game to keep anyone interested for more than 2-3 weeks. There are only so many Doduos and Pidgeys you can catch before you are bored out of your mind.

I'm actually at level 23, and I'm trying to "catch them all" - or at least, all that are in my country. Once I do that, I'll probably just wait for more content. That way I'll be well positioned if new content comes out.

The game hasn't even been released in every country, and to be honest I don't think it should have been released at all (at least until the combat system was decent). However, they clearly have an extremely popular game. Even if 99% drop off, and only 50% return they will still be raking in the dough.

Just out of curiosity, how long did it take you to get to that level? I am still rocking a level 12.

Well, I leave the game open at work and just spin the stops near me (there are three). Ive also walk an average of 20k steps per day since Pokemon Go came out.

I usually walk 15k steps, so it was a 30% increase.

I think what you and a lot of other people are talking about is burnout. People who are in the mid-20s levels have likely been playing quite a bit. Even if they started on day 1. But I think the game has a lot of longevity for more casual players.

Terribly true, and in some ways disheartening. Pokemon Go is successful because of the branding and I find it hard to imagine any independent developer achieving even a faint modicum of the same success within the same category (geo-AR games) for lack of that branding. Heck, even amongst established, popular brands which other ones could possibly have gotten the necessary critical mass off their butts and outside playing the game? Pokemon was sort of the perfect storm in that sense.

And that, to me, is a shame. I quite like the overall geo-AR concept. I live in a wholly uninteresting, mostly depressed (economically) area. Pokemon Go brings vibrancy and life to the surroundings, making it worthwhile to get outside and explore this new "world".

But when Pokemon Go dies, the city will go back to being what it always was underneath; a bland mixture of concrete, terrible food, and pay day loans. Will anything be able to pick up Pokemon Go's mantle? I have my doubts, and that's disheartening.

There's alot more that can be done. AR really feels like a chance to merge the real world with the digital finally. The indie developer would build on top of the platform that these new AR experiences create, not necessarily rebuilding these monoliths themselves (there should be no need). Once everyone is "living" in this AR world, we start all over again with new things that need to be made for it.

> building the right product trumps building a flawless product.

Y Combinator has been saying this for years, and I couldn't agree more. Niantic will iterate and fix problems, but Pokemon Go would have been doomed from the start if it wasn't what people wanted.

>Niantic has be strangely silent about bugs and server outages.

Honestly, this isn't surprising. Niantic isn't historically vocal about behind-the-scenes stuff.

"It's so crowded nobody goes there anymore"

Niantic has experience in longevity for this type of game https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingress_(video_game) ... Nintendo does too.

Though I wouldn't extrapolate too much from the first week meeting years of pent up demand.

The people that were interested in Ingress wanted a game that involved geolocation. The people that are playing Pokemon Go wanted a Pokemon game that put Pokemon "in their world". Unfortunately, Niantic is currently giving PoGo players a reskinned Ingress.

Their ability to maintain a small community of players interested in a geolocation game, while notable, does not extend to their ability to maintain a massive community of players interested in a Pokemon game.

I enjoy the game, but I'm playing for the same reason I continued to play .hack//Infection after I beat it: I'm making small investments in its future potential. But I refuse to spend a dime on it in its current state - a game that has neither the trading experience, the combat depth, or the sense of community that even the original Red and Blue versions offered out of the box.

Dude, it's been like 2 weeks. The game isn't even rolled out globally yet. Give them a second or two before we start talking about how the game lacks longevity. If you're burned out from power-gaming 4+ hours a day trying to catch them all, well then that's really a personal issue. Just doing the basics of catching all the types of pokemon offers HUGE amounts of longevity for more casual players who don't burn themselves out.

I didn't say the game lacks longevity, nor did I say I was burned out, nor do I have the battery life to play it 4+ hours per day (because I don't feel the need to play, recharge, and play again).

This is one of few games that I am very casual about on the play side, mostly because I'm more enamored with what potential the API hacking community has to offer than I am with the game itself.

> The people that are playing Pokemon Go wanted a Pokemon game that put Pokemon "in their world"

No, they didn't. The people playing Pokemon Go did not know what Pokemon were until two weeks ago. They didn't "want" anything. Fanboys might have wanted this. But fanboys of a 90s television show do not make up a significant part of the population.

It's pretty easy to see just walking around the neighborhood that there's already been a drop in interest.

Strange. In my neighborhood there has actually been an increase in players in the last week... They mostly come out at night though.

... mostly.

A month ago on my bike rides through a downtown park and along a river there were usually a decent group of people out enjoying the sunshine along the river, maybe 10% of them were using their phones. The other day I went through there and there were more (and younger) people out and virtually all of them were staring at their phones. Never seen anything like it in such a place.

Are they using the Google Cloud as the server?

In most of the world it is not even available, it will continue burning for a couple of months and if they add PvP, trading and other good stuff that the gameboy games had they will ensure indefinite success.

So in a thread about how massively successful this game is, we are all predicting the inevitable doom? Why? Of course one day it will die out, but so will literally every other game. So far these things have not stood in the way.

I think they'll be in trouble if a competitor makes an AR game based on a similarly popular IP that is more smoothed out. I'm not sure feasible that is in the near future, but it could happen.

The bugs and lack of features aren't going to be a big problem for some people because for them, it's as much a "meeting random people" app as it is a game. It's an ice breaker. Fighting over the gym with people from the neighborhood. Doesn't need to be complicated.

Where I live, the public parks are full of crowds of people and have Pokemon Go signs telling them that the park closes at 11pm and must leave. The rail stations have Pokemon Go signs warning travelers to pay attention when crossing the tracks. Business are throwing Pokemon Go-themed events to bring in customers. Bars are offering Pokemon Go themed drinks with discounts for players.

I was downtown when there was a four-hour outage of the servers. I saw on my server monitor that the login server came back online. I logged in immediately. From my location I could see about two dozen Pokemon stops. None of them had lures. Within five minutes, half of them had lures.

Only a handful of immature children on the internet care about the minor bugs and server issues. There will be no drop in interest any time soon.

75% of the time I launch the game, I'm confronted with an error that I couldn't be logged in.

Maybe the game is so popular because it feels like a rare resource. It's so hard to get into the game that when you do you have to play it as long as possible until the servers go down again.

Funny retrospective on the last 25 years of AR:

http://unanimous.ai/augmented-reality-then-and-now/

The numbers will absolutely drop. I mean, there's definitely a ton of content that can be added like earning gym badges, Gen 2-6 Pokemon (which people don't really care about), trading, PvP, etc. But, at the end of the day I doubt Niantic has the time/resources for that. The execution has been rather poor.

Still though there's a demand for Nintendo software on mobile. They just need to really to execute. They're really lucky we're tolerating these huge bugs (nearby Pokemon and frozen Pokeball after catch still outstanding).

Got to love Hacker News! Fastest downloading app of all time, global phenomenon, absolute zeitgeist..."The execution has been rather poor."

"Worse is Better" in action? :)

You have to admit they're lucky we love Pokemon so much that we're willing to tolerate restarting the game every 2 minutes to continue playing the game. I'm on HN. When I say execution is poor, I'm referring to their technical execution. In terms of game design, as someone who puts in several hours a day into the game, the execution is of course great.

> Fastest downloading app of all time, global phenomenon, absolute zeitgeist

All three of which can be attributed in large part to the Pokemon IP, rather than any other characteristic of the game.

You're saying that like Nintendo had nothing to do with making that IP what it is in the first place.

Nintendo did. Not Niantec

Why is their execution poor? They've broken every record in usage and growth. Designing a back-end to expect and support that level of usage out the gate would have been poor execution.

Servers crashing and people still tolerating it is strong evidence they made something people want, which in my mind is excellent execution. I guarantee if they made a crappy game they will not have server problems or loud bug complaints.

The tolerance comes from how much people love pokemon. The execution itself is terrible.

It really doesn't have the polish of a Nintendo Pokemon game. Execution being poor is referring to its technical accomplishments, not its gameplay.

Imo both the gameplay and the ux of the whole thing is terrible.

> Designing a back-end to expect and support that level of usage out the gate would have been poor execution.

It would have been good engineering. But anyway, it's been almost 3 weeks, and they still haven't fixed anything. You can tolerate as much as you want, but it's still an extremely poor execution. Most of the low-hanging bugs could be fixed in _hours_ not days, certainly not weeks.

I think that the biggest feature that Pokemon Go will add, that will hopefully come soon, is the ability to broadcast your position.

This is something that I wish ingress had done. The game is a multiplayer game, there is no doubt about that. I'd love to be able to open map map, see that some of my friends are over playing at $foo location, and then go meet them there.

Ingress had at least a proxy for that - an in-game chat with distance-filtering, i.e. you could limit messages you see to sources closer than X kilometers. As for third-party tools, someone somehow made a player tracker once; I think it used changes in portal owners to narrow down your location.

I think that the player tracker could get you banned from the game, though. It technically violates the ToS.

I built a chat app for pokemon go that allows people within a 5 mile radius to chat anonymously. It also has a crowd sourced pokemon spawn map where people can broadcast and located pokemons within their vicinity.

Once I can get Apple to stop rejecting it I'll post a link.

Would love to know the app who previously held the record.

I'd bet on something like the Facebook app, assuming they advertised it heavily when it first came out.

Facebook has been out for ages though, the number of total devices has grown significantly since then.

It's probably another game.

Maybe flappy bird?

No, flappy bird was a slow burn

A big week 1 surge requires pre-existing name recognition.

Games with a 2 in the name are the next most likely to have heavy first week downloads. Angry Birds 2 or Bejeweled 2 for example.

Flappy Bird wasn't overly popular when it came out, it was only later on that it went viral (I think about 6 months or so after it launched).

Clash Royale would be my guess. Recent release, IP carries over from a very popular existing game, but it's not just a sequel. Also had great word of mouth from the geobeta.

I have to speculate that Minecraft and Angry Birds have both individually had more downloads than Clash Royale.

Not the first Angry Birds, that was a snowball hit not a first week blowout.

Minecraft is paid.

I would guess FB Messenger or maybe Google Maps. Or something from China, seems like when QQ releases a core app there's millions who just go and download it.

Maybe Instagram? It was a Day 1 hit..

Overall, sure. In the first week of release, I'd be surprised.

Minecraft would be a strong candidate if it was a free app, but any price lowers your downloads drastically.

Is it actually a poparul game? I've never heard of it...

Yep. Hit #1 grossing in the first day, sustained pretty well.

I'd bet a dime on Angry Birds.

A game can't have everything the first day of launch. They released this to test it against the market. Now that it is a success, changes will come to increase retention and purchases. Now the next biggest events will be promoted also with Pokemon things to do in the place, like "get this rare pokemon on the Vegas Electronic Event. The game is a real success and the mechanics described by Richard Bartle proved that people loves to collect, it is the Diogenes syndrome but in mobile version.

The dropoff in interest has already started. I pretty much stopped playing last week. I got to level 14 and the amount of grinding required was just ridiculous (the amount of XP you earn per action does not increase as you level up meanwhile the XP required to level up goes up exponentially). The bugginess of the game really did not help.

The dropoff in interest has already, objectively speaking, started[0]. It's currently (as of July 22) 66% of its peak (per Google Trends). In my personal experience, interest on my college campus has already subsided. It's not completely dead, mind you, but the hype is over.

[0]: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=pokemon%20go&date=to...

Have I missed something, or is this game just about walking around collecting pokemons with eggs? Is there anything else to it that I missed? The interface isn't illuminating.

There's a bit more to it than that, but essentially, yes. The "eggs" are called pokéballs.

Well, the "eggs" aren't actually Pokéballs. The eggs are eggs that contain Pokémon and eventually hatch[0]. While Pokéballs are used to catch wild Pokémon[1].

[0] http://www.ign.com/wikis/pokemon-go/Eggs_and_Hatching [1] http://www.ign.com/wikis/pokemon-go/How_to_Catch_Pokemon

Honestly, I have exactly the same question. I saw dozen articles that talk about the thing but noone mentions exactly how it works / what happens after you catch a pokemon.

Interesting observation

So the thing is that nobody knew how it worked and all the information has been word of mouth from the process of deduction

annnnd people like it, which is the primary driving factor

(so the answer is open the app? if you are in a launched country)

> So the thing is that nobody knew how it worked and all the information has been word of mouth from the process of deduction

I really like this about it. At the popular spots near me, you can overhear a lot of rumors and guessing about how certain features work. "My friend says he caught his Dragonite at this gas station! But I wasn't there to see it, so I don't know if it's true."

It reminds me of the original games. When people would spread rumors about how "holding __ button while the pokeball spins make it work better" or "You can catch mew if you glitch behind this truck." and so on, almost none of them actually being true. In a few weeks, we'll have a P:GO Wiki filled with confirmed information, people analyzing the binaries to see what does and doesn't exist, realtime maps of exact pokemon locations.... And I just don't think it will be as magical anymore.

I much prefer "I think you can find this pokemon in that park" over "There is one of them at this intersection, and you have 11 minutes and 34 seconds until it despawns. Be sure to feed it only 2 razz berries, and then use a left curveball for the best odds."

> In a few weeks, we'll have (...) realtime maps of exact pokemon locations....

It's already here - https://pokevision.com/.

It happens for all popular games eventually and I agree that it kills the magic. It makes it impossible in most competitive games to win on knowledge. In most games you can compete on skill (or grinding), but I strongly miss that particular flavour of winning because you understand more about the game. I remember the days when as kids my friends and I were playing StarCraft over LAN, and at some point I started to kick their asses because I learned the attack type/armor type coefficients and height difference bonuses, while they didn't.

As for non-competitive games, you lose the discoverability aspect - but that at least can be overcome by purposefully refusing to read on-line material. I did that with Stardew Valley to my great enjoyment. The game would be much more boring if I simply went on-line, read the tips and started to min-max the shit out of it.

> is this game just about walking around collecting pokemons with eggs?

Pretty much.

You can also battle to control gyms, but the rewards are pitiful and the combat system / pokemon types are so poorly implemented that it's basically a waste of time. Where I live, all the gyms change teams every minute or so.

So you collect pokemon, level up, and pray that Niantic will add some better features soon (trading, PvP, ladder system, more rewards for gyms, etc.). But there's no indication that they'll do so...

There are actually some indications of enhancements and new features, trading being one that is confirmed: http://www.polygon.com/2016/7/12/12158480/pokemon-go-trading...

The game is an old school LAN party. You spend time face to face with your friends, shouting out to each other and having a good time. It gets you outside and after playing for a while you forget that it is imaginary. When one person sees a good Pokemon they will tell you where it is, not by showing a phone screen but by pointing to a location nearby.

Yes, it is just about walking around and collecting Pokemon.

These numbers are probably the reason why niantic was totally caught by surprise and have these massive server issues. I really don't like to see the app offline every time I have to go for a longer walk, but hey, I take it easy and wait for either niantiv upgrading their ressources or the userbase to shrink, which shouldn't take too long imo.

So, do we have an entirely new class of games/apps that are about to appear? Like Pokémon go but for ...

Yes. I bet you plenty of companies are already on it as we speak.

How does the numbers stack up between the downloads on Google play vs Apple?

As time pass there are more iDevices.... so the number can be irrelevant. So maybe a percentage as download/devices?

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