Niantic lays off 230 employees, cancels NBA and Marvel games

Is Pokemon Go successful? I feel it was huge for a few months in 2016, and then died as everyone moved on to other things.

>The fan base is very loyal to the Pokemon brand

I find it interesting that Nintendo fans can recognize they are slaves to the IP, but they don't change their buying habits.

For instance, if BOTW was released under a different IP skin and released for xbox, it would probably be a 6-8/10.

Since we were marketed to as children, I think we have limited free will when nostalgia comes up. We automatically give our childhood friends(corporate mascots) a pass on quality.

I am guilty, I keep playing every Zelda religiously, despite thinking BOTW wasnt good, I still plan to play TotK. I don't know why I do it. I feel like I need to play it.

I might have been a pokemon go addict, but the closest pokecenter(or whatever) was like a 5 minute drive/10 minute walk away.

Scary stuff. I know some people who are similar with Disney IP.

It seems somewhat comical to me that there's some kind of protest against niantic and it's being hosted on reddit.

iNaturalist is already integrated with the Seek app, which has badges and challenges. My biggest complaint is the image detection could be better, but I’m sure there’s plenty of room to improve the gamification aspect too.

https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app

wow this actually got upvoted really fast. It's an idea that's been bouncing around in my head for a long time now so I'm glad to see excitement about it even though I shoehorned it in to a barely-relevant HN thread (sorry). It should be really easy to get an MVP of this idea going given that the data is already there. The biggest design struggle I've actually had with it is figuring out an actual engaging game to make with it. It could be something like CryptoKitties (sorry to bring up NFTs but I think those ideas often have the same problem. They have a good "collection" idea at the root and then aren't really sure what to do with that collection) where you mainly maintain a collection and then "games" are a layer on top of that that anyone can make with the underlying data. Hope this isn't against the rules, but my email is in my bio if anyone's serious about furthering this idea or just wants to chat about it

See https://ebird.org/home

People outside the media, and games especially, underestimate the value of a big cross-media IP. If you end up working on them you find they are orders of magnitude larger in revenue terms and the spikiness of the business (in terms of surges of new users without needing advertising etc.) is unbelievable. The downside is the cost of entry is enormous.

The surprising part is which IPs have these hungry fanbases is not immediately obvious. I know some of those affected today are well aware of this and would assume that for whatever reason the dots didn't join up between the NBA or Marvel audiences and the sort of games Niantic make.

Having a small enthralled group of gamers is enough to make a lot of money. There are many, many, communities playing old online games serviced by small studios or as side projects of larger corporations.

Its a shame seemingly our entire industry has adopted a "Make 10s of Billions or GTFO" mentality for its projects. A lot is being lost by ignoring the "make a small beloved product" route.

> Then it just sort of vanished from public daily life, but somehow it lives on much more discretely.

Its actually the same with ingress. At least it was before PG.

I screenshoted the actual intel map. Thos connection between points are very very hard to achieve especially between continents.

https://i.imgur.com/3ZmLfUj.png

The scene is very active, still. Here in germany the same old guys play this game for years now. They drive around in vans with USB connectors and filled with like 6 people. Its actually a cool way to find friends and interact with people if you are a nerd.

Their next big game is

https://monsterhunternow.com/en

it would be fun to see "Monster Hunter" get some more exposure in the West, it's got an approach to character development different from the average RPG where you don't level up but instead progress through getting better equipment and "gitting gud".

It is so much easier to keep an online game running than it is to launch a new one, that's some of why I was shocked by Meta shutting down Echo VR. Sure they don't think Echo VR has the potential to get big enough to move the needle for them, but there's a lot of risk a new game won't get any traction at all.

It's a pay to win grindfest with little new content to keep people playing.

I have a poke stop next to my house. I see random cars pulled up there all hours of the night. I'm not worried about any robbers at this point. It's always someone looking at their phone for about 5-10 minutes and driving off. Last week there was a dude there in the dark. I just yelled out from my driveway (100 feet away) "you catch em all"... response was a sigh and "not yet". Guy was gone 3 minutes later.

It's like the video game equivalent of a smoke break at this point. Just a little thing to do.

There's a QA guy at the bar by my house who has 5 phones with him when he's drinking. 3 are pokemon, 2 are for work... 50% tho on if he works for niantic, hope he's still got a job. I live real close to their seattle office.

I don't think they ever needed the enormous crowds. That was helpful for getting the word out that the game existed and now everyone knows, but the truly devoted Pokemon fans are maniacs about it, and enough people are willing to spend either enormous time, enormous money, or both to keep playing. The core audience that grew up with this stuff is also mid-40s now, in the career stage where they finally have a lot of disposable income and probably young kids at the right age to introduce them to Pokemon, too. The IP on its own is so valuable, I'm not even sure the game itself needs to be that good.

It disappeared because they changed the game to require more grinding and more hassle. They tweaked the skinner box to the point people weren't excited to play it, so they stopped.

Is there any battling? You collect Pokemon in real world locations...that's kind of neat..but what's the game beyond collecting pokemon and bragging about all the different ones you've collected?

It's definitely still quite popular. I see others on the bus playing it a few times a week.

I have seen people playing it on the bus twice in the past week!

They also made a category of raids where you can not use a remote pass to participate.

It further reinforces that the game is made for city dwellers. The suburbs and rural areas are funny places that one might visit from time to time, but noting to concern yourself about.

> Due to inflation the exchange rate for our imaginary currency went down. Oh! Also there is inflation in the fictional universe so fictional prices have gone up as well, sorry about that!

The thing with Niantic games though is that you actually have to go places! To be fair, they managed to pivot a bit during COVID and allow game play at home which kept some players engaged.

I still miss the earlier days when we would have 20+ players across the island collaborating to complete self-designed Ops. Happens more less often now.

Multiple tech companies have said that. I really wonder about why any of these CEOs thought it was a permanent state of affairs though. The prior example, the Spanish Flu, was fought with lower tech and science and lasted what 3-4 years?

Given Pokémon Go is basically the only successful AR game and it definitely owes its success to Pokémon’s IP (IMO the gameplay actually sucks), and I haven’t seen any other AR games with compelling gameplay, I agree. But I think someone could make an AR game that can stand on its own - AR is just a medium, and there are plenty of regular games and mobile games that made tons of money with new IP.

Reskinning existing IP for an entirely new game like in Pokémon Go can be thought of similarly to a marketing expense. For the amount it costs to license the IP, you could allocate more money to original IP or other marketing.

“Legend of Zelda: Hetsu Korok Hunters” would be an instant hit if Nintendo & Niantic made it. Korok puzzles are perfect for an on-the-go AR game.

I no next to nothing about mobile games so I'm now curious. Is there a counter example you can provide where top tier IP was unsuccessful because the app/game/experience was so bad? I see a lot of this on reddit usually around "regular" video games where everyone says the won't prebuy or purchase a game because of past studio bugs or generally bad user/community experience but ultimately these games and studios still crush it. So I would definitely agree with your appraisal just kind of curious if there is a floor you can hit that is so bad that a game still fails still being an amazing IP.

I’d argue Fantastic Beasts is almost the perfect property to try and clone Pokémon with.

> I find it odd to see so many people here who didn't know Pokemon Go was still "a thing"

Why? There are an infinite number of “things” in the world and I’m aware of maybe a half dozen. Why would I know or care that Pokemon Go is still active?

It's pretty simple: If I don't know of anyone who does X, then X practically doesn't exist within my universe.

This is by design to create perceived value in the 100 for 0.99 bundle.

Reminds me of an old joke:

> His pricelist reads: 1 for $3, 3 for $10

> A young man stops by and asks to buy one watermelon. "That'd be 3 dollars", says the old man.

> The young man then buys another one, and another one, paying $3 for each.

> As the young man is walking away, he turns around, grins, and says, "Hey old man, do you realize I just bought three watermelons for only $9? Maybe business is not your thing."

> The old man smiles and mumbles to himself, "People are funny. Every time they buy three watermelons instead of one, yet they keep trying to teach me how to do business..."

Someone who pays to skip some in-game waiting or grinding likely will pay to not have to go through a payment flow 6 times to save $1, I guess.

What's the problem?

Smartphone games in general are still a big business. King's problems were (1) it had no moat, and (2) the strategy of "get people to spam their friends about game activities on Facebook" was squashed. Today it seems people depend on paid ads on the app store and elsewhere which is moaty for the ad exchange but not for publisher.

I think the potential of AR games is barely tapped but it's not an easy business, particularly if you want to do something new and risky. The strategy of sticking to IP that people are already into is a sensible way to justify dev costs and derisk.

The thing is, nobody is playing Pokémon GO as an AR game, they're playing it simply as a GPS/location game. The AR features actually slow down the gameplay, so everybody turns them off immediately.

Sources say $34 mln per month for Pokémon GO alone. Doesn’t seem like a fad to me.

Not true.

Ingress is still a thing.

Selling at the top requires a buyer who doesn’t think it’s the top. Not easy to always be the correct party in a market timing transaction.