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.
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.
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.
I usually walk 15k steps, so it was a 30% increase.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Honestly, this isn't surprising. Niantic isn't historically vocal about behind-the-scenes stuff.