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Comment by itcrowd | Hacker News Reader

It's cool to see how the game took the world by storm in such a short time. The "out-group" - including military personnel - was left completely in the dark as to what all kids seemed to know about: Pokemon, Gyms and Stops.

> "Plse advise the Commissionaires that apparently Fort Frontenac is both a PokeGym and a PokeStop. I will be completely honest in that I have not idea what that is," wrote Maj. Jeff Monaghan at CFB Kingston.

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From what I remember of age distribution of players, at least the ones I knew at work, the Major quoted in the article is on the cusp of being too old to have experienced pokemon as a kid whereas the front line personnel are in the target age for the game and app. I'm far too old for pokemon; the concept was invented right about the time I graduated college. The Major is probably about a decade younger than I am, plus or minus speed of promotion in the Canadian forces.

I suspect there was a lot of trolling the upper echelons by lower level personnel claiming they've never heard of any pokey-man and similar. That's how it would have rolled when I was in the Army. Privates always create their own fun. The military guy who convinced his boss to let him explore the base to find more pokemon for himself, err, I mean, strictly for research purposes, is a truly epic stereotypical military story.

Also

> The game's premise seems to be going to the 'PokeStops/Gyms' to collect 'Pokemon's' (we should almost hire a 12-year-old to help us out with this)

And I loved how the CFB Halifax made a recommendation that apparently (from my very limited understanding of Pokémon GO) requires getting some of their people to play the game to upgrade the stops at the museum :D

I’m pretty sure you can’t upgrade locations from within the game (or at least could not at the time the locations were landmarks seeded from Ingress), I’d guess the recommendations were for contact to niantic.

But I wonder if it really did get that much popular as implied in the popular press. Clash Royale released about the same time was much more popular.

Clash Royale is popular? Sampling my entire social sphere: around where I live, everyone and their dog plays or at least briefly played Pokemon Go. Clash Royale is a title I know only from the constant advertising spam on Facebook; I haven't seen a single person playing it ever.

I know it's just a local sample, but for something supposedly more popular than Pokemon Go, I'd expect to encounter at least one player.

All the royale games are popular enough that high level accounts can be sold for sizeable chunks of money quite easily.

I know some people in the middle east who even do it as a side "job" since the pay is significant enough

interesting. any idea how much a level twelve deck at 5300 is worth?

pokemon go is a much more "visible" game. if you have any idea how the game works, it's really obvious when you see people playing it irl. it's hard to notice people playing clash royale unless you look at their screen or hear them talking about specific cards from the game. when I was waiting for a flight at the airport recently, almost all the kids seemed to be playing clash royale.

anecdotally, I don't notice clash royale being as popular with adults as pokemon go. it may be true that it's not very popular in your world, if you don't spend a lot of time around children/teenagers. in my bubble, I hardly ever see people playing pokemon go anymore.

The game was insanely popular for the few weeks immediately following launch in 2016. It is entirely possible that Clash had more players, but they weren't all outside walking around while looking at their phones in places they'd never visited before.

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