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Ad Agencies Scramble to Form ‘Pokémon Go’ Strategies

yoodenvranx 10y ago
Is there already a legal discussion going on about who actually owns the 'virtual' real space? Let's say you have company A and company B who offer the same service in a city. Company A now buys a sponsored virtual Ingress portal / PokeStop / ad-banner in the real-world location of company B with the message "Come visit us at location of company A, we have more pokestops and we offer better prices". Would this be legal?
- btown 10y ago
  This already occurs in the third-party controlled "virtual reality" of Google search ads, where you can bid on a competitor's brand name. As this article indicates, there are drawbacks that keep this practice rare if the ad network operator is thoughtful in building a fair market: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/06/12/bidding-on-competitor-brands http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/06/12/bidding-on-comp...
- ianhawes 10y ago
  I don't see how it would be illegal. In Baltimore, there are 2 competing casinos about 10 miles apart off of the same highway. When you approach the newer casino from any direction, there are multiple billboards advising you to keep driving to the older competing casino for better payouts and other bonuses.
  - yoodenvranx 10y ago
    Yes, but doing it in augmented reality means that casino A could put ads _inside_ of casino B. Just imagine casino A would pay some guys to carry advertising sign inside of casino B. Those guys would be removed instantly. Or let's say somebody creates a AR game where you can leave signs with random texts everywhere. And then somebody decides to plant a sign with "OP is bundle of sticks" on your property. In the real world you can just remove the sign and call the cops, but what would you do in the AR world? If there will be too much shenanigans I can see that in the future your real property boundary might translate into the virtual AR world.
    - DavidWanjiru 10y ago
      I suspect this will eventually go the way domain names went. Initially, any random person would register microsoft.com, and Microsoft didn't have much recourse back then. Now they do, I believe, and I feel like this is a similar question of ownership of something virtual.
    - protomyth 10y ago
      Is this augmented reality a public space or specific to an app? I'm thinking that will be one determinate.
    - DavidWanjiru 10y ago
      I suspect this will eventually go the way domain names went. Initially, any random person would register microsoft.com, and Microsoft didn't have much recourse back then. Now they do, I believe, and I feel like this is a similar question of ownership of something virtual.
    - ominous 10y ago
      Inside I can access the mcdonald's website when I am inside a burguer king. I can phone a friend and get a suggestion to buy a Xbox when I am evaluating footage from a PS4. I can be at home, access the starbucks website and get a pop-up from hangouts where a friend might ask me to have coffee... in his house! What do you mean inside?
      - spdustin 10y ago
        Yes. But you don't see a poster for a Whopper while looking at the McDonalds menu board, do you?
        kirykl 10y ago
        But why couldn't you be free to see the Whopper poster in that case? McDonalds owns the store, they don't own my vision while I'm in their store. Until we are given implants at birth, the user chooses to enable augmented reality
- 794CD01 10y ago
  It's not actually in copmany B's space. It's in Niantic's database and the associated coordinates match the location of company B. The law doesn't come into it. You don't own information just because it happens to be about you. Especially if it's about a real world location which you only temporarily lease.
  - adrianN 10y ago
    > You don't own information just because it happens to be about you. The lawsuits that force google to blur faces and some houses in Germany seem to indicate otherwise. Those are privacy related problems, but I think they still show that your blanket statement needs more nuance.
    - 794CD01 10y ago
      Sure, some countries have stupid laws. I would still say homosexuals are people who deserve the same rights as anyone else, even though there are countries where that is not true.
  - noddingham 10y ago
    Except the law does come into. If the coordinates in Niantic's database are on private property, then you'd be trespassing.
    - x1798DE 10y ago
      Only if you physically go there.
- Vexs 10y ago
  Interesting possibilities- there's already examples of people having gyms on their houses and having people milling around their yards all day. There was also an "incident" where a koffing showed up at a holocaust museum- and the museum got pissed. Like someone below me mentioned, virtual ads could be pretty powerful too, and, y'know, what's to stop someone from constructing virtual dicks in front of a building. (Besides whoever runs the AR service) There's really not a DMCA-like-thing for AR stuff.
- Mahn 10y ago
  Right now technically the virtual representation of real life locations belongs to the developer, so I don't think what you describe would hold in court at all. But it's a conversation that we may need to have depending on how massive and pervasive these AR games/services become.
- keithrl 10y ago
  Lawyer here. I wrote a pretty lengthy analysis on implications of AR application intersecting with real property: http://associatesmind.com/2016/07/11/is-pokemongo-illegal/ http://associatesmind.com/2016/07/11/is-pokemongo-illegal/ It's a novel issue of first impression. There is no controlling statute or case law. The most we can do is make informed speculation at this point. My guess is that at some point a court will find that property rights will extend to geo-spatial, virtual property boundaries. That is, you retain control of how your property appears in 'cyberspace.'
  - wyager 10y ago
    Jesus, I hope that's false. Cyberspace isn't real. It's absolutely insane to suggest that one ought to have control over some abstract data just because there exists a vague correspondence between some part of that data and some piece of land they own in the real world. Should photographs of buildings be illegal? After all, it's just a virtual representation of the real property. In fact, it's a much closer representation than just "these fake coordinates vaguely resemble these real coordinates".
    - tremon 10y ago
      I think you're missing context here: the GP specifically said he was talking about implications of AR application intersecting with real property.
      - yoodenvranx 10y ago
        Yes, exactly, I am not talking about some random virtual world but specifically about AR and its connection to the real world. I wonder what the military thinks about the Ingress portals and PokemonStops on their bases. In worst case that will results in some virtual ban zones around military compounds where AR is forbidden.
      - BatFastard 10y ago
        AR and its intersection with real property is a HUGE topic. Can people post ads on your building in AR? Can they write nasty things about you and your customers? Can they setup trap for drug dealers? There are literally hundreds of such questions. Do you have control over how Google maps depicts your properties, how about China Netcom? AR is the worlds biggest genie, and people are just starting to become aware of it. The idea of "Controlling AR" is ridiculous! Its going to come from a million places..
- bbctol 10y ago
  I hope there's at least going to be some agreed-upon best practices. Pokemon Go seems to draw from the Ingress dataset of interesting places, which excludes a lot of private residences, unless your house is particularly interesting: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/07/11/what-happens-when-pokemon-go-turns-your-home-into-a-gym/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/07... I'm glad that guy seems okay with it, but there are real repercussions to a third party instantly turning your home into a location in a game without your permission or even giving warning. If these sorts of games become more popular, someone will start raising a stink.
BatFastard 10y ago
I think Pokemon Go has WENT, yesterday day there were 40 people in the local park at 7:30 am. Today 1 person.
- viewer5 10y ago
  That's some quality data collection. Thank you for your diligence and perseverance.
  - BatFastard 10y ago
    I have learned to trust my observations. If one day was raining and the next nice, I could understand, but there were both lovely days in the middle of the week.
    - kbhn 10y ago
      Two days of observation with zero control does not seem sufficient to make a definitive statement on the product. I've been going on walks with my doggo every night this week; the amount of people I've seen playing pokemon has remained fairly constant during that time frame. Don't mind me, just trusting my observations...
      - BatFastard 10y ago
        I think you need a job in the government. Then you can collect data for 10 years to decide the people are not really using dial up connection as much as they used to. If the number had gone from 40 to 20, that is within a understandable deviance. But when the number goes from 40 to 1, I think the bubble has popped. You may not agree, but I did not think that data collection was a requirement for posting here. Perhaps 40 years in the tech industry was enough for an educated opinion.
- Grazester 10y ago
  Maybe the Pokemon have relocated to another location.
- 10y ago
kirykl 10y ago
If its one thing I'd rather not augment my reality with its more ads
- protomyth 10y ago
  Me neither, but I think we are going that way. As an example of what I would consider ad hell, the film HYPER-REALITY https://vimeo.com/166807261 https://vimeo.com/166807261 has been submitted several times with the most comments being https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11754564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11754564
- syntheticnature 10y ago
  Indeed. http://www.kaleidotrope.net/archives/autumn-2012/dead-merchandise-by-ferrett-steinmetz/ http://www.kaleidotrope.net/archives/autumn-2012/dead-mercha...
alexcroox 10y ago
Paywall article
- ominous 10y ago
  Here: http://archive.is/Bgaj4 http://archive.is/Bgaj4
- Unbeliever69 10y ago
  Paywall article, and ad blocker walls are the scourge of HN.
- mrweasel 10y ago
  In case you hadn't noticed, you can click the "web" click below the title, that will normally, via Google, let you access the articles. I only learned that a month or two ago, it's quite handy.
- aerosmile 10y ago
  If you access the article from a Google search results page, the paywall disappears. Just search for the title of the article in Google and click on the top result.
anexprogrammer 10y ago
Chances are, if Ingress was anything to go by, the lifetime of the game is too short for any of these strategies to make sense. After a month or two of killing your battery life whilst collecting GPS data for google, most seem to move on or lose interest. (I've not installed Go, and don't intend to, so it may have some actual game in there beyond collecting and tagging locations. Everything I've read seems to indicate it's as shallow as Ingress with a graphics change). By the time they have a strategy and have included locations the moment will have probably passed. I also wonder how non-playing folks at a sponsored gym (say) will feel about the foyer or cafe being full of kids playing phone games. At least some attempts will carry negative as well as positive consequences.
- mrgoldenbrown 10y ago
  9 out of 10 of the "kids" playing phone games have been 20 or older in my experience with Ingress and Pokemon Go. So far Go lets you search for pokemon, power them up, and "battle" with them. Trading is coming. Isn't that pretty much everything the previous umpteen Pokemon games let you do?
  - sspiff 10y ago
    While I am hopeful of future updates fleshing out the mechanics in the game and adding features, so far it is lacking much of the detail, content and depth that have allowed Pokemon games to retain their audience's attention. Unless they flesh out the gameplay (either with new elements or mechanics, or by "porting" over from the existing games in the Pokemon franchise), the success of the game could easily be short lived.
  - anexprogrammer 10y ago
    Same with Ingress then and careless wording on my part. Actually there were quite a few older folks trying Ingress too. But it had very little sticking power.
- Vexs 10y ago
  The biggest issue is it doesn't really have any mechanics beyond "catch pokemon". There's not really gameplay, short of the laughable gym battles. You can realize this after about a half hour of playing. Nintendo is sitting on top of a big giant pile of money, but I get the feeling they want to gimp Go in favor of their mainstream games. Seriously, all they need to do is add a basic pokemon PVP with the same battle mechanics from the mainstream, and maybe random events, and they could keep it going for a good while longer. Also, the always-on-gps is a huge issue with it. They need to find some way to lessen it.
mrweasel 10y ago
Would it be so bad if for once ads and marketing didn't jump on a trend? Is letting people play Pokemon and not trying to sell them something unrelated really such a bad thing? I'm finding it increasingly difficult to accept business that needs to "latch on" to trends and product of others. If you can't sell your product and services on their own merits, then maybe the existence of your business isn't exactly justified.
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  I agree, but... We have a world with far too much stuff. For every business meeting a need there are 50 cheap copies and 20 not so cheap desperately trying to get noticed. Every trend will get latched on to an ever increasing degree. Most trends come from commercial intent anyway and the latching on is just turning on the "monetisation strategy". No one wants to sell a thing any more, but a recurring licence. It's no wonder adblocking is growing like topsy
- csydas 10y ago
  For users? Probably not. For ad companies? Absolutely. I don't mean this maliciously towards you or advertisers, but you need to understand that advertisers see the world through ad-tinted glasses - you can tell it based on how they try to sell physical ad-space. A billboard will gleefully tick away with "number of people who would have seen your ad". Placards above urinals or in stalls in bathrooms will talk to you about "now this is captive audience". A person isn't a person, they're a demographic of set {male, gay, republican, gunowner, iphoneuser} or any series of fields. I do agree, it's annoying and as a person, insulting to have companies prying away at my privacy just to try to sell me stuff I don't want or need, or sometimes already have. (just looknig at skype right now on my work machine, it's trying to sell me Office 365 when we're married to the Windows Environment already) But I'm not an advertiser - I don't see the world through their eyes, and they would make far less money if they saw the world through my eyes. A good advertiser isn't really congruent with respecting privacy or letting things be, and sometimes the difference that jumping on a trend like this can make is "selling [100] good burgers" a day versus "selling [500] good burgers" a day. Even if your burgers stand on merit, if you had the metrics to show that you could quintuple sales, wouldn't you try at least? Even if you fell as short as 1.5(burgers_sold) compared to 5(burgers_sold), you'd still likely make more than you spent on the ad. It sucks, but as much as they're jerks for doing it, we're suckers that keep on buying and making it work, or at least we make it look like it works.
6stringmerc 10y ago
And, perhaps with a tinge of cynicism, I will watch and see how many try to jump on the bandwagon, fail, and are run over by it.
sdneirf 10y ago
They would have to buy thru Google since it's a Google spin out. However, Google SDK isn't present in the app now. Unity SDK is in for the game engine and it's the same SDK that can serve ads. https://medium.com/@kevinleong789/what-sdks-does-pokemon-go-use-c85217b48323#.7uwi0qasl https://medium.com/@kevinleong789/what-sdks-does-pokemon-go-...
adwf 10y ago
My local pub is a pokemon gym, so they got something right at least. Planning on going for lunch there tomorrow because of that, so I wouldn't discount the potential opportunities for local business advertising. The real question is how do businesses get their location in the game? My local is older than the USA so I can imagine how it's a point of interest, but your average high street store? Maybe they could sell micro-lures that have a very limited proximity. Instead of being a broad region, you have to actually get very close to the shop.
- lfowles 10y ago
  It's roughly pulling from the Ingress dataset. The Ingress portals were user submitted (there are some hilarious examples of things like ashtrays or bad graffiti being landmarks already).
nlawalker 10y ago
Long-term success for Pokemon Go is in the opposite direction of more complex gameplay. Gamers - people who enjoy plumbing the depths of complex game systems and using their knowledge and skill to gain an advantage over the system and/or other players - are screaming for it, but they'll tire of it eventually, and adding it will put off the much larger casual audience. As Niantic representatives have already stated, people who want to play traditional Pokemon games can go play them. Niantic's best move is to keep the hook baited for people who like the simple novelty of walking around to collect stuff and interacting with an augmented version of the real world and will casually integrate it into their life, like many have already done with fitness trackers. This kind of integration is now the gold standard for casual games - prepare to see a lot more apps/games with a GPS/maps component. The biggest "gameplay" updates for PG aren't going to increase game system complexity, they're going to be more reasons for casual players to continue looking at their screens as they walk around (and gather in groups to continue to attract press attention). Random events, more stuff to collect, opportunities for personalization, a few buttons to press to casually influence the environment. The biggest updates will involve "business accounts" for those who want to own a piece of virtual property, advertise, attract players to a physical location, etc. AR/GPS may well prove to be an awesome platform for "real", complex games, but Pokemon Go is not going to be one of them.
- stcredzero 10y ago
  Niantic's best move is to keep the hook baited for people who like the simple novelty of walking around to collect stuff and interacting with an augmented version of the real world Why can't Niantic create an infrastructure for both groups? Trading would give both types of players a place in such a world.
stcredzero 10y ago
The take-away for game designers: The hook is the ability to walk around as if the world of Pokemon was this world. This is orthogonal to the depth of the game's mechanics and the casual/hardcore dimension. There is tremendous fun in anything that aids in pretending the world you're walking around in is the real world. Isn't that the main point of most childhood toys -- aids to "let's pretend?" Isn't that where the most pure joy comes from? One should be able to effectively do this with any franchise or property that people care about. How about "force ghosts" for Star Wars? Star Trek: The Next Generation style stealthed "observation posts?" (As in the "Who Watches the Watchers" episode. [1]) Chronicles of Narnia? Bleach? Any wish fulfillment where someone might have hoped against hope that the world in the book/movie was somehow real. Finding such properties isn't hard, as this wish fulfillment trope is widely used in fiction. (I wonder if an augmented reality gold rush is going to cause a "burn out" of this trope?) [1] - http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Who_Watches_The_Watchers_(episode) http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Who_Watches_The_Watchers_...
oliv__ 10y ago
...And news outlets scramble to write articles about anything Pokemon GO

Is there already a legal discussion going on about who actually owns the 'virtual' real space? Let's say you have company A and company B who offer the same service in a city. Company A now buys a sponsored virtual Ingress portal / PokeStop / ad-banner in the real-world location of company B with the message "Come visit us at location of company A, we have more pokestops and we offer better prices". Would this be legal?

btown 10y ago
This already occurs in the third-party controlled "virtual reality" of Google search ads, where you can bid on a competitor's brand name. As this article indicates, there are drawbacks that keep this practice rare if the ad network operator is thoughtful in building a fair market: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/06/12/bidding-on-competitor-brands http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/06/12/bidding-on-comp...
ianhawes 10y ago
I don't see how it would be illegal. In Baltimore, there are 2 competing casinos about 10 miles apart off of the same highway. When you approach the newer casino from any direction, there are multiple billboards advising you to keep driving to the older competing casino for better payouts and other bonuses.
- yoodenvranx 10y ago
  Yes, but doing it in augmented reality means that casino A could put ads _inside_ of casino B. Just imagine casino A would pay some guys to carry advertising sign inside of casino B. Those guys would be removed instantly. Or let's say somebody creates a AR game where you can leave signs with random texts everywhere. And then somebody decides to plant a sign with "OP is bundle of sticks" on your property. In the real world you can just remove the sign and call the cops, but what would you do in the AR world? If there will be too much shenanigans I can see that in the future your real property boundary might translate into the virtual AR world.
  - DavidWanjiru 10y ago
    I suspect this will eventually go the way domain names went. Initially, any random person would register microsoft.com, and Microsoft didn't have much recourse back then. Now they do, I believe, and I feel like this is a similar question of ownership of something virtual.
  - protomyth 10y ago
    Is this augmented reality a public space or specific to an app? I'm thinking that will be one determinate.
  - DavidWanjiru 10y ago
    I suspect this will eventually go the way domain names went. Initially, any random person would register microsoft.com, and Microsoft didn't have much recourse back then. Now they do, I believe, and I feel like this is a similar question of ownership of something virtual.
  - ominous 10y ago
    Inside I can access the mcdonald's website when I am inside a burguer king. I can phone a friend and get a suggestion to buy a Xbox when I am evaluating footage from a PS4. I can be at home, access the starbucks website and get a pop-up from hangouts where a friend might ask me to have coffee... in his house! What do you mean inside?
    - spdustin 10y ago
      Yes. But you don't see a poster for a Whopper while looking at the McDonalds menu board, do you?
      - kirykl 10y ago
        But why couldn't you be free to see the Whopper poster in that case? McDonalds owns the store, they don't own my vision while I'm in their store. Until we are given implants at birth, the user chooses to enable augmented reality
794CD01 10y ago
It's not actually in copmany B's space. It's in Niantic's database and the associated coordinates match the location of company B. The law doesn't come into it. You don't own information just because it happens to be about you. Especially if it's about a real world location which you only temporarily lease.
- adrianN 10y ago
  > You don't own information just because it happens to be about you. The lawsuits that force google to blur faces and some houses in Germany seem to indicate otherwise. Those are privacy related problems, but I think they still show that your blanket statement needs more nuance.
  - 794CD01 10y ago
    Sure, some countries have stupid laws. I would still say homosexuals are people who deserve the same rights as anyone else, even though there are countries where that is not true.
- noddingham 10y ago
  Except the law does come into. If the coordinates in Niantic's database are on private property, then you'd be trespassing.
  - x1798DE 10y ago
    Only if you physically go there.
Vexs 10y ago
Interesting possibilities- there's already examples of people having gyms on their houses and having people milling around their yards all day. There was also an "incident" where a koffing showed up at a holocaust museum- and the museum got pissed. Like someone below me mentioned, virtual ads could be pretty powerful too, and, y'know, what's to stop someone from constructing virtual dicks in front of a building. (Besides whoever runs the AR service) There's really not a DMCA-like-thing for AR stuff.
Mahn 10y ago
Right now technically the virtual representation of real life locations belongs to the developer, so I don't think what you describe would hold in court at all. But it's a conversation that we may need to have depending on how massive and pervasive these AR games/services become.
keithrl 10y ago
Lawyer here. I wrote a pretty lengthy analysis on implications of AR application intersecting with real property: http://associatesmind.com/2016/07/11/is-pokemongo-illegal/ http://associatesmind.com/2016/07/11/is-pokemongo-illegal/ It's a novel issue of first impression. There is no controlling statute or case law. The most we can do is make informed speculation at this point. My guess is that at some point a court will find that property rights will extend to geo-spatial, virtual property boundaries. That is, you retain control of how your property appears in 'cyberspace.'
- wyager 10y ago
  Jesus, I hope that's false. Cyberspace isn't real. It's absolutely insane to suggest that one ought to have control over some abstract data just because there exists a vague correspondence between some part of that data and some piece of land they own in the real world. Should photographs of buildings be illegal? After all, it's just a virtual representation of the real property. In fact, it's a much closer representation than just "these fake coordinates vaguely resemble these real coordinates".
  - tremon 10y ago
    I think you're missing context here: the GP specifically said he was talking about implications of AR application intersecting with real property.
    - yoodenvranx 10y ago
      Yes, exactly, I am not talking about some random virtual world but specifically about AR and its connection to the real world. I wonder what the military thinks about the Ingress portals and PokemonStops on their bases. In worst case that will results in some virtual ban zones around military compounds where AR is forbidden.
    - BatFastard 10y ago
      AR and its intersection with real property is a HUGE topic. Can people post ads on your building in AR? Can they write nasty things about you and your customers? Can they setup trap for drug dealers? There are literally hundreds of such questions. Do you have control over how Google maps depicts your properties, how about China Netcom? AR is the worlds biggest genie, and people are just starting to become aware of it. The idea of "Controlling AR" is ridiculous! Its going to come from a million places..
bbctol 10y ago
I hope there's at least going to be some agreed-upon best practices. Pokemon Go seems to draw from the Ingress dataset of interesting places, which excludes a lot of private residences, unless your house is particularly interesting: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/07/11/what-happens-when-pokemon-go-turns-your-home-into-a-gym/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/07... I'm glad that guy seems okay with it, but there are real repercussions to a third party instantly turning your home into a location in a game without your permission or even giving warning. If these sorts of games become more popular, someone will start raising a stink.

BatFastard 10y ago

I think Pokemon Go has WENT, yesterday day there were 40 people in the local park at 7:30 am. Today 1 person.

viewer5 10y ago
That's some quality data collection. Thank you for your diligence and perseverance.
- BatFastard 10y ago
  I have learned to trust my observations. If one day was raining and the next nice, I could understand, but there were both lovely days in the middle of the week.
  - kbhn 10y ago
    Two days of observation with zero control does not seem sufficient to make a definitive statement on the product. I've been going on walks with my doggo every night this week; the amount of people I've seen playing pokemon has remained fairly constant during that time frame. Don't mind me, just trusting my observations...
    - BatFastard 10y ago
      I think you need a job in the government. Then you can collect data for 10 years to decide the people are not really using dial up connection as much as they used to. If the number had gone from 40 to 20, that is within a understandable deviance. But when the number goes from 40 to 1, I think the bubble has popped. You may not agree, but I did not think that data collection was a requirement for posting here. Perhaps 40 years in the tech industry was enough for an educated opinion.
Grazester 10y ago
Maybe the Pokemon have relocated to another location.
10y ago

kirykl 10y ago

If its one thing I'd rather not augment my reality with its more ads

protomyth 10y ago
Me neither, but I think we are going that way. As an example of what I would consider ad hell, the film HYPER-REALITY https://vimeo.com/166807261 https://vimeo.com/166807261 has been submitted several times with the most comments being https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11754564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11754564
syntheticnature 10y ago
Indeed. http://www.kaleidotrope.net/archives/autumn-2012/dead-merchandise-by-ferrett-steinmetz/ http://www.kaleidotrope.net/archives/autumn-2012/dead-mercha...

alexcroox 10y ago

Paywall article

ominous 10y ago
Here: http://archive.is/Bgaj4 http://archive.is/Bgaj4
Unbeliever69 10y ago
Paywall article, and ad blocker walls are the scourge of HN.
mrweasel 10y ago
In case you hadn't noticed, you can click the "web" click below the title, that will normally, via Google, let you access the articles. I only learned that a month or two ago, it's quite handy.
aerosmile 10y ago
If you access the article from a Google search results page, the paywall disappears. Just search for the title of the article in Google and click on the top result.

anexprogrammer 10y ago

Chances are, if Ingress was anything to go by, the lifetime of the game is too short for any of these strategies to make sense. After a month or two of killing your battery life whilst collecting GPS data for google, most seem to move on or lose interest. (I've not installed Go, and don't intend to, so it may have some actual game in there beyond collecting and tagging locations. Everything I've read seems to indicate it's as shallow as Ingress with a graphics change). By the time they have a strategy and have included locations the moment will have probably passed. I also wonder how non-playing folks at a sponsored gym (say) will feel about the foyer or cafe being full of kids playing phone games. At least some attempts will carry negative as well as positive consequences.

mrgoldenbrown 10y ago
9 out of 10 of the "kids" playing phone games have been 20 or older in my experience with Ingress and Pokemon Go. So far Go lets you search for pokemon, power them up, and "battle" with them. Trading is coming. Isn't that pretty much everything the previous umpteen Pokemon games let you do?
- sspiff 10y ago
  While I am hopeful of future updates fleshing out the mechanics in the game and adding features, so far it is lacking much of the detail, content and depth that have allowed Pokemon games to retain their audience's attention. Unless they flesh out the gameplay (either with new elements or mechanics, or by "porting" over from the existing games in the Pokemon franchise), the success of the game could easily be short lived.
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  Same with Ingress then and careless wording on my part. Actually there were quite a few older folks trying Ingress too. But it had very little sticking power.
Vexs 10y ago
The biggest issue is it doesn't really have any mechanics beyond "catch pokemon". There's not really gameplay, short of the laughable gym battles. You can realize this after about a half hour of playing. Nintendo is sitting on top of a big giant pile of money, but I get the feeling they want to gimp Go in favor of their mainstream games. Seriously, all they need to do is add a basic pokemon PVP with the same battle mechanics from the mainstream, and maybe random events, and they could keep it going for a good while longer. Also, the always-on-gps is a huge issue with it. They need to find some way to lessen it.

mrweasel 10y ago

Would it be so bad if for once ads and marketing didn't jump on a trend? Is letting people play Pokemon and not trying to sell them something unrelated really such a bad thing? I'm finding it increasingly difficult to accept business that needs to "latch on" to trends and product of others. If you can't sell your product and services on their own merits, then maybe the existence of your business isn't exactly justified.

anexprogrammer 10y ago
I agree, but... We have a world with far too much stuff. For every business meeting a need there are 50 cheap copies and 20 not so cheap desperately trying to get noticed. Every trend will get latched on to an ever increasing degree. Most trends come from commercial intent anyway and the latching on is just turning on the "monetisation strategy". No one wants to sell a thing any more, but a recurring licence. It's no wonder adblocking is growing like topsy
csydas 10y ago
For users? Probably not. For ad companies? Absolutely. I don't mean this maliciously towards you or advertisers, but you need to understand that advertisers see the world through ad-tinted glasses - you can tell it based on how they try to sell physical ad-space. A billboard will gleefully tick away with "number of people who would have seen your ad". Placards above urinals or in stalls in bathrooms will talk to you about "now this is captive audience". A person isn't a person, they're a demographic of set {male, gay, republican, gunowner, iphoneuser} or any series of fields. I do agree, it's annoying and as a person, insulting to have companies prying away at my privacy just to try to sell me stuff I don't want or need, or sometimes already have. (just looknig at skype right now on my work machine, it's trying to sell me Office 365 when we're married to the Windows Environment already) But I'm not an advertiser - I don't see the world through their eyes, and they would make far less money if they saw the world through my eyes. A good advertiser isn't really congruent with respecting privacy or letting things be, and sometimes the difference that jumping on a trend like this can make is "selling [100] good burgers" a day versus "selling [500] good burgers" a day. Even if your burgers stand on merit, if you had the metrics to show that you could quintuple sales, wouldn't you try at least? Even if you fell as short as 1.5(burgers_sold) compared to 5(burgers_sold), you'd still likely make more than you spent on the ad. It sucks, but as much as they're jerks for doing it, we're suckers that keep on buying and making it work, or at least we make it look like it works.

6stringmerc 10y ago

And, perhaps with a tinge of cynicism, I will watch and see how many try to jump on the bandwagon, fail, and are run over by it.

sdneirf 10y ago

They would have to buy thru Google since it's a Google spin out. However, Google SDK isn't present in the app now. Unity SDK is in for the game engine and it's the same SDK that can serve ads. https://medium.com/@kevinleong789/what-sdks-does-pokemon-go-use-c85217b48323#.7uwi0qasl https://medium.com/@kevinleong789/what-sdks-does-pokemon-go-...

adwf 10y ago

My local pub is a pokemon gym, so they got something right at least. Planning on going for lunch there tomorrow because of that, so I wouldn't discount the potential opportunities for local business advertising. The real question is how do businesses get their location in the game? My local is older than the USA so I can imagine how it's a point of interest, but your average high street store? Maybe they could sell micro-lures that have a very limited proximity. Instead of being a broad region, you have to actually get very close to the shop.

lfowles 10y ago
It's roughly pulling from the Ingress dataset. The Ingress portals were user submitted (there are some hilarious examples of things like ashtrays or bad graffiti being landmarks already).

nlawalker 10y ago

Long-term success for Pokemon Go is in the opposite direction of more complex gameplay. Gamers - people who enjoy plumbing the depths of complex game systems and using their knowledge and skill to gain an advantage over the system and/or other players - are screaming for it, but they'll tire of it eventually, and adding it will put off the much larger casual audience. As Niantic representatives have already stated, people who want to play traditional Pokemon games can go play them. Niantic's best move is to keep the hook baited for people who like the simple novelty of walking around to collect stuff and interacting with an augmented version of the real world and will casually integrate it into their life, like many have already done with fitness trackers. This kind of integration is now the gold standard for casual games - prepare to see a lot more apps/games with a GPS/maps component. The biggest "gameplay" updates for PG aren't going to increase game system complexity, they're going to be more reasons for casual players to continue looking at their screens as they walk around (and gather in groups to continue to attract press attention). Random events, more stuff to collect, opportunities for personalization, a few buttons to press to casually influence the environment. The biggest updates will involve "business accounts" for those who want to own a piece of virtual property, advertise, attract players to a physical location, etc. AR/GPS may well prove to be an awesome platform for "real", complex games, but Pokemon Go is not going to be one of them.

stcredzero 10y ago
Niantic's best move is to keep the hook baited for people who like the simple novelty of walking around to collect stuff and interacting with an augmented version of the real world Why can't Niantic create an infrastructure for both groups? Trading would give both types of players a place in such a world.

stcredzero 10y ago

The take-away for game designers: The hook is the ability to walk around as if the world of Pokemon was this world. This is orthogonal to the depth of the game's mechanics and the casual/hardcore dimension. There is tremendous fun in anything that aids in pretending the world you're walking around in is the real world. Isn't that the main point of most childhood toys -- aids to "let's pretend?" Isn't that where the most pure joy comes from? One should be able to effectively do this with any franchise or property that people care about. How about "force ghosts" for Star Wars? Star Trek: The Next Generation style stealthed "observation posts?" (As in the "Who Watches the Watchers" episode. [1]) Chronicles of Narnia? Bleach? Any wish fulfillment where someone might have hoped against hope that the world in the book/movie was somehow real. Finding such properties isn't hard, as this wish fulfillment trope is widely used in fiction. (I wonder if an augmented reality gold rush is going to cause a "burn out" of this trope?) [1] - http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Who_Watches_The_Watchers_(episode) http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Who_Watches_The_Watchers_...

oliv__ 10y ago

...And news outlets scramble to write articles about anything Pokemon GO