I stopped within the first few days when I realized you can't actually battle your Pokemon with other people. That's OBVIOUSLY what people wanted, but luckily we had a stupid minigame at gyms?
Can't imagine a worse execution of such a successful IP on such a breakout platform.
Pokemon Company really let me down. I know it's not their fault, but they should've spoken up about the whole thing.
I understand the design complaints--the gameplay won't resonate with anyone wanting a strategy game of any depth--but saying they did poorly is pretty hyperbolic. It obviously struck a chord with some segments as I do still see people playing in dense areas (and at the local game stores).
I also think looking into Niantic's past work or Pokemon Company's past partnerships would've revealed this game couldn't possibly have the mechanics of the core Pokemon line, but I do understand that the marketing and messaging was very vague.
It's as if they only had a very vague concept of what it was actually like to play a single-player Pokemon game on a handheld.
BUG CATCHER wants to BATTLE!
At launch, the only way your kids could fight with their pokemon is if you all pile into the car and drive to a nigh-random location too far away to reach on foot and fail to displace the otaku-whale that managed to put a level 500 Vaporeon on the gym with the Rattattas, Pidgeys, and Weedles that are the only things to show up in your neighborhood.
The game still needed to be both fun and playable entirely within the bounds of a single neighborhood, and it just wasn't.
A large part of the fun came from doing silly things like all nighters with friends and drinks and... portable battery of course.
Not sure what the alternative would be though, a single player version would have been incredibly boring. Maybe some sort of co-op based multiplayer instead could be done, but I'm not sure what that would look like.
If they pulled some real social-interacting game, pokemon-like, at the scale they currently have...
Not just gameplay, but bugs. This game was so horrendously buggy at launch, I'm amazed it survived at all. Stupid things like having every button click wait synchronously for a response from the server before doing anything, or always trusting the client, or not implementing retry on requests, so you had a 50% chance of being permanently stuck on the catch a pokemon screen until you restarted.
I honestly can't remember a game with worse execution that actually managed to survive. If people loved it for the gameplay, they would have moved onto one of the many clones that implement the features better (and have trading and pvp). But it's not gameplay people want, it's Pokemon.
Just because people use it doesn't mean it's artistically meritous.
My opinion isn't subject to YOUR conditions. I've played Pokemon games since a very early age, and I had certain expectations for the experience that weren't even close to met in the final product.
The marketing was vague, but it's not like a complex concept either. It's pokemon on the go, in the real world. It's not a scavenger hunt game, and that's what we ended up getting.
I could be a bit nicer about how I explain it, but I LOVE Pokemon and this game is a giant blemish on the legacy, as far as I see it.
Was it? A lot of people were really enthusiasts. Groups were created, friendships were made. Portable battery chargers were purchased. New phones were acquired.
A lot of people still play old pokemon games. A lot of people play new pokemon games. There was no excuse to how Niantics managed their community early on.
Don't even get me started on the bait and switch of the original trailer.
If we're talking about enthusiasts who still actively play the latest and greatest Pokemon games, Pokemon Sun and Moon only sold about 15 million units last year when it came out. (Probably a couple million more have sold since, but I can't find any up to date numbers.) To still have 50 million more active users than units sold of the latest core franchise game I think is pretty good.
As for the nostalgic enthusiasts that you're probably thinking of more, I would still think that those who play the old games are much fewer and farther in between. I'd be surprised if there were still 650 million people picking up old Pokemon games. Pokemon Go was a nostalgic fad that everyone and their mother (and some grandmothers) decided to pick up because it was the cool new thing.
Not saying that Niantic didn't drop the ball early on--they did. But even if they were on the top of their game, I still don't think of the 650 million downloads that they were going to be able to retain a majority of those users.