28 ms·

Pokémon Go loses its luster, sheds more than 10M users

209 points by shawndumas 10y ago

Semiapies 10y ago
Some of it is undoubtedly a craze shedding the least-engaged, but I wonder how much of that could be due to it being August and people not wanting to traipse around in the height of summer. I got interested in the game, but I decided to wait a bit as daily high temperatures hovered at the century mark.
- wvenable 10y ago
  In other places, August is a comfortable time to traipse around compared to the rest of the year. You want get outdoors when the sun is out and it's warm.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    August is turning out to be downright pleasant compared to the hellacious July we had, but that didn't stop people from mobbing the local Pokestop clusters. There's a spot downtown here that's so bad they're debating putting up a fence to contain the players and keep them from interfering with a ferry terminal that's close by: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-ferry-terminal-pokemon-go-moved-away-1.3705865 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-ferry-terminal...
  - pseudointellect 10y ago
    Today I learned, weather varies by location. So one person saying weather is bad in place A will likely produce another person to counter them saying weather in place B is okay.
  - zeveb 10y ago
    > You want get outdoors when the sun is out and it's warm. Many people, no doubt, but I'd prefer to get outdoors when it's grey and snow is falling. When the sun's out, it burns my skin; when it's above freezing, there can be rain. Cold & snowy is easy to deal with: throw on a coat, a hat and a scarf. Hot is impossible to deal with: cool or die. Actually, even if one cools down, the sun will give one skin cancer. So, really, it's cool and die.
calbear81 10y ago
I am a semi-active Pokemon Go player in the SF Bay Area and I can tell it's definitely died down over the last few weeks. In the beginning, every Friday/Saturday/Sunday night, the whole downtown area would be lured up and people would be out mingling and catching pokemon in the local park. This past weekend, there were only a few lures and a few diehards milling around the park. There's a few dynamics at play based on personal experience: 1) Many players don't care about the gym battling system and just wanted to "collect" Pokemon. Once you've collected most of the ones in your area, you're going to get bored catching the same pidgeys, weedles, and rats/bats. My SO and I have gone to different areas to catch other Pokemon but you just need to go a few times and now we both have "most" of the common Pokemon. We're not hardcore enough to want to spend more time hunting the last few missing in our deck. 2) The lack of support and response from Niantic when the game was badly broken turned off a lot of casual players. Hardcore players will forgive them but casual players especially on iOS expect a lot more polish and "it just works" from a top selling game. I wonder how much of a fit Nintendo threw when this happened given they are a partial owner/investor in "The Pokemon Company". 3) The gym battling system mechanics are not great. You basically can throw bodies at a gym until you knock them down. There's no P2P battling which would make it more exciting since the gym AI is predictable in their attack patterns and most players know the dodge, attack, dodge routine now. The whole premise is to take down a gym, revive your Pokemon, collect potions/revives, do it all over again.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  I agree with everything you say, but I think it all boils down to "it's the PVP, stupid." Imagine if the actual Pokemon games never had trainers outside of gyms. I don't know about you, but after a while it would start to feel like a repetitive chore.
  - thatswrong0 10y ago
    Yep. I grew up with Pokemon and didn't even install Pokemon Go.. but if it had legit PvP battling and trading, I would definitely give it a spin. How cool would it be if you were walking down the street with your phone in your pocket.. and all of a sudden it started vibrating, you pick it up - TRAINER BATTLE. You look around, and you see someone else with their phone out looking around too. Now all of a sudden you're in a pokemon battle with a total stranger! So much potential for cool experiences.. and yet they're doing nothing of the sort.
oneloop 10y ago
I've been saying that Pokemon Go is going to go the same way as the Kinect and the Wii. Fun for the novelty, but beyond that the fundamentals are very bad. Therefore, once the novelty starts to wear off....
- mkaziz 10y ago
  I thought the Wii had great fundamentals. I loved playing a lot of the core Wii games.
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    How many of the core wii games used motion controls? Even the big Nintendo IP games used primarily a classical control scheme if not exclusively.
    - whateveracct 10y ago
      Both Mario Galaxies (arguably the best two games on Wii) used motion controls along with buttons+analog stick. It was wonderful and not overdone.
    - minimaxir 10y ago
      The top-selling Wii games were the Wii Sports games + spinoffs, almost all of which were primarily motion-control: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Wii_video_games https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Wii_vid...
      - rtkwe 10y ago
        I think those sales numbers are skewed in favor of Wii Sports because it was bundled with the console the same way The Lab is for the Vive.
        minimaxir 10y ago
        True; the others were not, though. (Except there may have been a SKU with Wii Sports Resort)
OpenDrapery 10y ago
Anyone remember "Drawing with Friends"? It was all the rage for about 15 minutes.
- turingbook 10y ago
  It is Foursquare on steroids.
  - lispython 10y ago
    Nice metaphor.
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  And before that Words with Friends.
kafkaesq 10y ago
As with with any other dopamine-jerking drug -- first there's a rush; then a plateau; then a refactory period. And just like the more familiar (street-level) drug dealers, the creators are going to have to think of something stronger, longer-lasting or at least more novel-seaming in order to maintain market share. Or cede their turf.
- AJ007 10y ago
  I thought the spike in usage from the beginning was a contrarian indicator for long term popularity. The rapid viral growth clearly saturated the potential playerbase within the first week. Rapid market saturation means you do not have time to test and optimize for long term user retention. Hypothetically you could get all of the variables correct on day one, but unlikely.
  - nommm-nommm 10y ago
    Didn't they have a beta though? They should have expanded that.
Wheaties466 10y ago
I'm sure the ban wave of legitimate players interest has died down.
TheOneTrueKyle 10y ago
Not everyone is going to be a master
unbelievr 10y ago
On release day, the app itself was great. It had a warmer/colder system with 0-3 paw prints to track down the Pokémons in your vicinity. Hunting down things you missed was a game in itself. When the servers weren't dying, the game was quite responsive too. Fast forward a week, and the warmer/colder system is broken. All the Pokémons are always 3 steps away, which means somewhere within 1km radius. And you have 15 minutes to find that one you're missing. You can still see them from 100 meters away, and the app is quite responsive when you get close to them. The downtime is unbearable at times, and people are losing items they paid real money for due to this. Then we fast forward two weeks. People have started reverse-engineering the internal API and are using it to create maps over nearby Pokémons. The brokenness of the tracking system is acknowledged at some convention (not publicly on their site), but no promises are made on fixing it. Niantic starts sending out C&Ds to projects using their APIs, trying to remove bots and tracking websites. Despite their own tracker being broken. The app is now limited to communicating once per 10 seconds, and you can only see Pokémons 70m around you. After successfully hiring a PR manager, Niantic breaks their deafening silence and tells us that the tracking system will not be fixed. They will replace it with something better. A new app rolls out, now with request signing to combat tracking websites. This takes about 5 days to crack before business returns to usual. People really want to be able to track their Pokémons, and having no ways to do so put a lot of people off. Closing Pokevision made many of my friends quit, because to them, Niantic didn't share their concerns at all. Finally, the tracking system is replaced with a new one. You can now detect nearby Pokémons up to 200m (vs 1000m before). You still need to get within 70m of them to actually see them though. Niantic also activate an extra tracking system in certain American states, as a beta test. This has been active for about two weeks now without hitting the rest of the player base. Unfortunately, it is based on Pokestops, which are user-submitted landmarks from their previous game, Ingress. A lot of places do not have these at all, or extremely few. This makes the game basically unplayable in rural areas, where you'll rapidly run out of items or never find anything interesting. For me, personally, I feel this game has great potential, but I really miss more openness from Niantic. What are their plans for the future? Which concerns are they acknowledging? Which are intentional features of the game, and thus ignored? I think this game basically blew up in their faces, and they weren't ready to handle the interest. It's sad that they let this chance go, because I think it will be extremely hard for them to redeem themselves after this.
wcarss 10y ago
The loss and subsequent banning of maps and map users made nearly everyone I know stop playing, especially in the total absence of an official replacement or a compelling reason to continue. Hearing my map ding was enough cause to make me leap out of my chair and run to the nearby park at midnight to catch something I wanted, and there'd usually be the usual lure-users and a few map-users out there at the same time. Once I was out, I'd play for a while, hit a gym or two, maybe finish an egg, and go home. This was still really fun when it was disabled. Without the map, there's no reason for me to leave my house. There's no group of people at work who stand up when a Blastoise is announced into our #pokemon channel, sending us all on a brief Pokemon/coffee walk down the road. That's all on top of the poor quality of the game, which the maps and community had overcome. Niantic being selfish and not understanding their own game or the culture around it seems to have squandered one of the greatest opportunities a company has ever had. (I get that the maps were spamming them, but that's a technical challenge. A bunch of well funded ex-googlers ought to be up to the challenge of scaling/handling unexpected load for a chance like this.)
- cheald 10y ago
  This is on the money. Niantic made it harder and more frustrating to play their game, and people stopped playing it. They have utterly failed to understand what their playerbase wants, and people are falling off. The maps really drove it into overdrive, especially with the presence of "nests", because it allowed people to figure out where they needed to be, and would then congregate there. By taking out the maps, Niantic has turned their scavenger hunt into a scratch-off lotto ticket - don't bother trying to plan or play with any strategy, just wander around aimlessly until your phone buzzes. Who wants to do that? It's a shame, because at its core there is a compelling scavenger hunt that generated a truly unique social phenomenon, and it's very sad to see Niantic just piss that away. The game just isn't worth putting any effort into - they broke the effort-reward cycle.
  - nathankleyn 10y ago
    It's particularly aggravating playing it in a large city (for us London) where, without the maps as a guide, you're stuck wasting balls on common Pokémon incessantly because that's the only thing around. Add to that the fact that they made it, with a recent update, insanely likely for anything half-decent to simply run or be impossible to catch, and you have a recipe for declining interest in playing and paying to be bored.
kin 10y ago
It was an awesome phenomena to witness while it lasted. Sadly this is how it is with most games. People get bored if there's no stream of content to keep them engaged. Other games stay on top for so long by continuing to have in-game specials, events, and deals as well as DLC. Everything from Niantic since release has honestly just been catch-up and bug fixes.
120bits 10y ago
This is what I have noticed in just my friend circle. I was never an active Pokemon Go player, but few of my friends were really into the game. Every Friday we would go out for a walk, in near by park and they will have their phone out and be catching Pokemons. I guess it was just how much more I can catch thing. They always wanted to get the rares ones. Who doesn't right? Last 2 weekends I have noticed 2 of my friends didn't care much. And, slowly, the interest faded away. Now we all going for paint ball. I don't know if it's Ninatic not coming up with good updates or its just a common thing with every mobile game. Angry birds, Candy crush and now Pokemon Go?
- wott 10y ago
  > I was never > Every Friday we would > They always wanted > Last 2 weekends I have noticed 2 of my friends didn't care much. And, slowly, the interest faded away. "Every", "always", "slowly", and the overall feeling of a long tradition. Er... guys... can you remind us how long this fad lasted? When was it introduced? 6 years ago? 6 months ago? No, that's 6 weeks ago, men! So, 2 weeks ago was just 4 weeks after the beginning... Is it the CADT at work, describing an extremely short, transient fling about a lousy game as a tradition? I was amazed by people pretending this was (another) revolution in gaming and life, that allowed them to socialize (ever heard of walking down to your local bar? apparently not) and to take a walk (wow). And now, just one month after all that fuss, it's already scrapped and life goes on as it was before that was a thing. Or was it never a thing and people rushed into making theories about it without thinking further than their nose? That would be surprising. Ahem.
  - 120bits 10y ago
    I think I was more focusing on the rise and fall of famous "mobile gaming" in general. There was time everyone I knew was into Angry Birds. Every guy I meet tells me how their wife or gf are into candy crush and just addicted to it. And now everyone has jumped on the Pokemon go bandwagon. Hence, the interest fading away eventually. This is just what I have noticed among the people I know.
  - Gargoyle 10y ago
    So, to be clear, you think the basic mechanic of geography based gaming (there must be a better name for it) is a fad and it's already fading? I strongly disagree. In my opinion what we just saw was the initial burst of public enjoyment of that game mechanic, and now that the concept has very widespread familiarity, the ground is set for better games to come along and dwarf Pokemon Go. It actually was a revolutionary moment, but it seems many want to assume the initial burst was the big bang. I think that's very wrong.
technofiend 10y ago
Unlike the predecessor app there's no strategy to Go and just like the predecessor app lots of lazy people want to ruin the game for everyone else by cheating through GPS spoofing, automated game play and data scraping. Not to mention both games share Niantic's less-than-stellar customer service which means issues are addressed haphazardly if at all. The good news is I think the market's broken wide open for another AR app, hopefully one with more compelling gameplay that isn't structured to be the next Farmville/Game Of War/whatever in app purchase digital cash cow.
djsumdog 10y ago
I feel like this is a case, "No shit, what did you think would happen?" It is a free-to-play game after all. I'd suggest watching the developer of Braid talk about free-to-play games. He compares them to 90's syndicated TV shows, each one being independent and leaving you with a cliffhanger prior to each commercial break. When HBO started producing long running series that would eventually be released on VHS and DVD, you saw much more long arching story. Even though Pokemon Go has a lot more going for it than many other free-to-play games, it still works on a model that limits how far you can go without buying stuff. That's how those game companies make money. I met a Pikpok dev once who said 80% of people delete their games once you can't really advance without buying stuff. A couple spend $80 ~ $200 (more than they would on a traditional title) and a few, the "Whales," would dump $2k upwards into these games. They depended on those players to make the games profitable. Free-to-play are like quarter-based arcade games .. on your phone. They're a pretty big step backwards in gaming.
- vlunkr 10y ago
  While I mostly agree, I wouldn't say they are entirely a step backwards. Pokemon Go broke the mold and did something that would not really work on any past platform.
  - tux1968 10y ago
    I have never played Pokemon Go, but i'm curious what mold it broke? Ingress was around a long time previously and as far as i've surmised contains essentially all the features of Go plus some more. What it lacked was the compelling and nostalgic branding that Pokemon has. Genuinely curious.
    - icefox 10y ago
      Shops paid to put lures out, it was a way to get advertisers to pay for the game, but without spam ads.
    - vlunkr 10y ago
      Yes, in some ways PGo is a re-skin of Ingress, But I felt like it was much more accessible. It appeals to a massive demographic.
cowholio4 10y ago
It's still pretty big in Taiwan. All this for a Snorlax! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoYjVTbLWyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoYjVTbLWyo [EDIT: Removed pvp mention because I couldn't find a source]
- reustle 10y ago
  Also huge in Bangkok still. I see people with matching Pokemon Go tshirts, there are loads of lures around Siam in the afternoon, and hundreds of people camped out all over the malls playing for hours (particularly outside Siam Paragon).
  - wsc981 10y ago
    Then again the game was only introduced in Thailand at the start of august.
StavrosK 10y ago
I only started playing because my friends did, and the only way for me to stomach the boring game was to write a bot for it. I enjoyed going around and getting levels with a bot, trying to figure out how to best evolve my Pokemon automatically, write inventory management scripts, etc. After they deleted my account for that (fair enough), I uninstalled the app. I wasn't going to run around catching and releasing Rattatas all the time, as the game is one of the most grindy games I've ever seen, but there's pretty much nothing else to do in the game either.
NDizzle 10y ago
They drastically changed some algorithms to (seemingly) make more money. They made the pokemon break free MUCH more often with the update about 10 days ago. You now have to use way more pokeballs to capture things. So much to the point that it's unfun. I don't live near a pokestop so I can't top up quickly. Another thing they did was make it so the pokemon disappear if a range check puts you far enough away from the point of initial contact. Combine that together and nobody can play the game in the car anymore, even if you're not driving! So they spent a bunch of time changing existing features to be less fun without adding any new features that are fun. Not a good idea. I have been playing with my wife and two of my kids. We all stopped playing because it's simply not fun anymore.
- mjevans 10y ago
  The update also (at least on my Nexus 6P) made GPS related issues dramatically worse; it's like they don't comprehend that in a place with a lot of tall buildings or trees you're not going to get a 'solid' GPS lock a majority of the time. Combine that with a UI popup (mid capture interaction no less) that steels input focus (it stops your ball toss), telling the user something they LITERALLY have no control over fixing, and quite possibly ruining your chance at capturing a more rare Pokemon and it is insanely frustrating.
  - riskable 10y ago
    The GPS issues have nothing to do with getting a GPS fix. It's just a plain ol' bug. My GPS is spot-on when using any app other than Pokémon Go which pretty regularly states that the GPS isn't working when I'm holding my phone in my hands to an open sky with no clouds. It doesn't matter what I'm doing or what device I'm using it always shows that GPS error message every 30 seconds to 1 minute.
    - squeaky-clean 10y ago
      > The GPS issues have nothing to do with getting a GPS fix. It's just a plain ol' bug. GPS on phones aren't that accurate, especially downtown, but most applications will filter the data because of that. Ever use Google Maps for directions and make a turn different from what the app is telling you to do? Your car icon will continue down the "correct" path for 15-30 seconds before re-adjusting to the new route. This actually happens all the time, it's just more likely that your GPS is misreporting you as 20m east instead of you taking a different turn, so the app holds off on updating the display until it is more sure. So it's a combination of the two factors. But most apps handle it muuuuch better than P:GO does. Here's a link I was able to find on running apps specifically. Apps that deal with you being on foot will obviously have a harder time determining exactly where you are, as opposed to apps for driving where you're moving faster, in a straight line, and down a grid of streets. http://radianttap.com/blog/2012/comparing-accuracy-of-the-gps-based-running-apps/ http://radianttap.com/blog/2012/comparing-accuracy-of-the-gp...
timmytokyo 10y ago
I think it just comes down to the game being not very good. It's not really designed for retention. Once you've caught the Pokemons you care about, there's not much left to do. Gyms are not an interesting mechanic, and there's no other way to interact with other players in the game. Basically, Niantic put out a half-baked game, which was rapidly successful only because it built on the combination of a fantastic idea (AR gaming) and a cherished IP (Pokemon).
dom96 10y ago
I'm honestly surprised that there is still 30M users playing. The original tracking system they had in the game was fine, it worked well and I mostly enjoyed playing the game with it. Can anybody shed some light as to why they removed it?
BryantD 10y ago
Note: still the top grossing app in the iOS App Store. As always, don't forget to put the scary raw numbers into context. 12 million out of 45 million means they've retained 73% of their user base month over month. We can't derive actual retention numbers from that because new users, etc. but 15% is great month over month retention for a F2P mobile game. Assume Pokemon Go is doing that. That would mean 6.5M of their current user base stuck around since the beginning of August, and they picked up just under 25M new users in one month. I dunno about you, but I'd be really pleased if my new game got 25M new users in the second month after release. Not as good as the 45M I got in the first month, but that's not rationally sustainable. Time spent in game dropping is bad. DAU dropping is bad. I wouldn't spin this as good news. Niantic could absolutely be managing live operations much better. But click bait is click bait. If you're sitting here saying that it's failing because everyone you know stopped playing, you need to figure out how to make your mental model explain why it's still top grossing.
- wsc981 10y ago
  In august the game became available in Thailand, a potential huge new user base. Perhaps the game opened up in other parts of the world as well. This could mean the percentage of users playing dropped by a much bigger amount in existing countries.
  - BryantD 10y ago
    Thailand is not a big mobile game marketplace in comparison to the US, China, Japan, or Europe. However, you make a good point -- the numbers lose even more context when they're not broken down by country, particularly when the launch was staggered. E.g., Pokemon Go launched in Japan on July 21st, which means any numbers captured at the beginning of August reflect initial launch volumes.
- dade_ 10y ago
  And some casual players, myself included, just haven't been keeping up on the constant app updates so it won't let me connect. I usually collect the little monsters on my evening walk or errands. It's amusing and I think they still have a great opportunity. Also amusing is visiting a certain message board to read posts that complain about a new application's features while most are doing agile development and releasing MVPs themselves.
jedberg 10y ago
With winter, and the colder weather, approaching, they really better figure out some game mechanics that you can do inside at home, or that user number is going to drop like crazy. I've been saying this for a while -- it was fun to play for a few days, but I live in a suburb. I have to walk at least .5 miles to get to a Pokestop and they never spawn near my house. I'll still play when I go to new places, but that's about it. Now, if there were some way for my wife and I to battle each other at home, that would be whole different ball game.
- hackernews2000 10y ago
  The weather is going to get warmer on the opposite side of the world from you.
  - Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
    Depending on how the battles with his wife go, it could get a whole lot colder!
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - graywh 10y ago
    But that's only about 12% of the world's population. And even less are below the tropics.
  - jedberg 10y ago
    True but there are a lot fewer people on that side of the world, and even fewer still who would be considered "1st world" enough to have the spare time and the smartphones with data plans necessary to play.
    - hackernews2000 10y ago
      Your stereotypes are disgusting. My working class relatives in Brazil are playing it. We don't live in huts.
Brendinooo 10y ago
Anecdotal, but I'm still playing pretty regularly and still greatly enjoy the game. I like having the app open when I'm on a run. I can hatch eggs, take a breather at gyms, and pick up a lot of Pokemon. Tracking was never an integral part of my game experience, which is maybe why I didn't feel as affected by the changes. I never completely understood the complaints. Niantic has a right to make a (free-to-play!) game and don't owe us anything. And since this is a dev-centric community, many of us can appreciate how stressed out Niantic engineers probably are right now after a difficult launch. I get that maps were cool - I have a nice Dragonite to show for it, but it always felt like a hack that was going to go away. The old tracking system was better, but I'd rather have the performance of August than the tracking system of July. Losing users was probably inevitable. This game was everywhere in the news, so I'm sure plenty of people tried it out and realized it wasn't for them. Combine that with people who miss their maps as well as maybe adjusting the numbers after catching bots, and that probably covers most of the numbers.
- mahranch 10y ago
  You say tracking was never an integral part of your game experience and then say you don't understand the complaints. Heh. That's what a vast majority of people are complaining about because tracking was an integral part of their game experience. That's the reason so many of us liked the game to begin with. Imagine if a game like Soul Caliber or Street Fighter took away the fighting aspect of their game. You may think the main fun part of soul caliber is unlocking stronger/hidden weapons, or selecting the right match-up in street fighter, but a majority of people enjoy the combat aspect. I continued to play after they took out tracking because I thought it was only temporary. Now I finally realize it's permanent so I haven't logged in to Pokemon Go in 7 days now.
hkmurakami 10y ago
No matter what happens to Pokemon Go, Nintendo has proved to the world that its IP is immensely powerful and valuable in the mobile age. That's a nice weapon to have to shut up "analysts" who always want them to take the path to short term gains. I remain bearish on Pokemon go and bullish on Nintendo.
- jmcdiesel 10y ago
  Its not their IP though, is it? Its the Pokemon Company, and nintendo only gets a small percentage of the licensing...
  - stormbrew 10y ago
    Nintendo owns 33% of TPC. But they also own some amount of Creatures Inc, which owns 33% of TPC (Gamefreak is the other third share). So it's not clear how much control they have over pokemon, but it may in fact be a controlling interest. Never mind that not all shares are voting shares. I'd be pretty surprised if Nintendo weren't at least de facto in control of Pokemon, personally.
    - hkmurakami 10y ago
      In addition, Pokemon is not the only strong IP that Nintendo has in its arsenal. I was in the audience at a Hironobu Sakaguchi interview recently, and one of the things that has stayed with me was that Nintendo told the FF team back in the 90's, "You need to take better care of your characters." Nintendo has certainly done that for itself over the course of many decades, and it's always paid off for them despite many short term troubles they've encountered.
IhateMicrosoft 10y ago
I was banned for using a 'map' as this violated the terms of service. And this left me with no other way to play the game but to violate the terms of service. So you know what - I don't play anymore and Niantic created that situation; not me. What did they think I would do if they left me without a way to play without violating the 'ToS?'
betadreamer 10y ago
I still play regular but it is getting pretty mundane. But that is not because pokevision and other 3rd party was banned. In fact they were supposed to be banned a lot earlier. The map users (myself included) will never pay for pokemongo but might pay for the map. This is not a good business model for them and in fact it defeats the purpose. Instead of hunting or seeking you are basically shopping. The reason why it is getting boring is actually something else... it is in the flaw of their game design. This game is extremely biased toward people who live around water with high density such as Santa Monica and San Francisco. You can catch Dragonite and bunch of starters there. But most people instead will catch eevee and growlithe at the best. Basically after a while you finish catching every pokemon around you and there is nothing else to do other than fight gyms. But gyms are so easy to beat that you don't have much incentive to defend it.
- fl0wenol 10y ago
  Agreed. The process by which you fortify gyms is broken. Leveling up your gym is very time-consuming and can too easily be undone, especially by other players nearby. There needs to be a better way to handle gyms and battles that scales with local user activity... perhaps a shunt to a PvP mode that grants the winner or the winner's color a certain amount of exclusive access time to fortify. The game is not similar enough to Ingress for the existing tit-for-tat ideas to work. Fire XMPs <=> Gym Battle; Add Resonators to Portal <=> Put Champion on Gym. Where's the equivalent of shields or key-based recharging at a distance? Why can't I buff my pokemon stationed on a gym (or the gym itself) with items after an alert that the gym is being battled?
  - betadreamer 10y ago
    This is a great idea. They should have an item that buffs the gym for 24hr. This will create a nice mechanics where you want to put your pokemon on these buffed gym (more incentive to train) and it will be challenging to beat in general. Players that beats the gym also gets more XP.
take_it_online 10y ago
There were so many other ways they could have made money with the scaling issue they had. If their servers can not handled the amount of users using the map function to track pokemon, set this feature as an item. Once a day a user can track pokemon for 1-2 30min session a day. Then if users want an extra session to track pokemon, they would only have to pay a few pokecoins. This way they can please the userbase and easy the resources used.
jagger27 10y ago
If there's one thing The Pokemon Company and Gamefreak can do well it's to iterate. There will always be an opportunity for Nintendo to make an in-house sequel. Niantic can and should be cut out of the picture in the future.
- echelon 10y ago
  Why should Niantic be cut out? Nintendo owns a (large?) share of them. They could become a second party, like Retro Studios.
  - ben_jones 10y ago
    If Niantic management is responsible (I mean they are but did they make wrong decisions, or did they make ok decisions in bad circumstances?) you can argue that keeping that same management involved in a sequel could be detrimental to the evolution of the game. It also makes it harder to shed the failures of the first iteration. Personally I think Niantic's entire team was plain overwhelmed and failed to adapt. Some decisions were made for money, and you can argue that they were unnecessary, but their is also no doubt a lot of people worked really hard and tried their best to make it work. There is of course value in that experience that can be applied to future iterations. The future looks great for AR at least.
Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
I hope they add some more stuff to the game to keep it fresh and interesting. As it is, I've caught Pokemon, won Gym Battles, lost Gym Battles, evolved Pokemon, visited hundreds of Pokestops, and Hatched Eggs. I think I've touched on every game mechanic, though I haven't caught every Pokemon. I'd like to see some things that allow the players more ways to change the map in a way that interacts with other players. Right now that's only done by Gym Battles and by placing Lures in Pokestops. Some of the ideas I've got are: - Some way for players to place markers on the map to indicate that Pokemon have seen, rally players to a spot, etc. - A way for players to create new Pokestops. - Some kind of quest mechanic where players could create quests and embark on quests created by others. All of these could be tied to the in-game purchase system. They'd need some way to prevent abuse of it, of course. The biggest problem I have is that it feels very much like a single-player game, and a fairly shallow one at that, with some very minor multiplayer elements.
NamTaf 10y ago
The game consists of 2 mechanics: 1) Collect everything 2) Battle gyms for arbitrary cred at the moment, both oppose each other because the maps people make to make #1 easier, make it easier for a subset of people to dominate #2 easier. By removing the maps that make #2 so unbalanced, #1 becomes a repetitive chore. There's literally nothing more to the game than those two mechanics. There's no end goal like the other pokemon games. There's no higher goal to work towards from capturing gyms and holding areas. It's no surprise that the game is dying. Either you collect the 80% that are easy to find and then it just becomes a huge chore without the necessary tools to find the last 20%, or you powerlevel up to fight in gyms for a bit and then... what exactly? Niantic should've taken another 3-6 months of heavy dev time to really polish it and add more depth to it. Create a higher purpose for holding gyms. Create a more compelling search mechanism that doesn't allow maps but then doesn't make the last 20% of the search such a huge, completely random-chance chore. There needs to be more to the game than those two mechanics and every moment it's released but there's not, it just withers. No amount of patching in an IV% calculator by visiting your 'trainer' will help that, because it still just relies on those two very broken pillars.
- vacri 10y ago
  This was the problem with Niantic's earlier game Ingress. It was fun to play while levelling up, which masked some of the repetitive nature of the game, but once you reached the highest level, there was nothing else to do except keep doing what you were already doing. The problem with all of these kinds of games (MMOs in particular) is that people consume content far faster than it can be created. It's quite difficult to create self-sustaining content.
  - Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
    This is why they need a way for players to create this content somehow. Look at the success that Quake and Doom saw with people making maps, mods, full-blown total conversions, etc. I don't think going that extreme applies to Pokemon Go, but it's an example of how players can create the content that prolongs the life of the game. What I'd like to see is ways for players to do things that have lasting effects on the map. Whether it's moving Pokestops, or making Gyms have some higher purpose, or something I can't think of, I'm not sure. Right now it's a fairly shallow single-player game that has some extremely minor (Gyms and Lures) multiplayer mechanics.
overgard 10y ago
I'm not an expert on this, but, those numbers don't seem awful to me. I realize not everyone started the game at the exact same time, but retaining 75% of your users a month later seems pretty good. Pretty much any mobile game is going to have some churn, and given their stratospheric launch it's not like they were realistically going to grow. Given the (MAJOR!) quality problems they've had, they can probably stem the bleeding quite a bit if they just fix those things.
- mahranch 10y ago
  Mobile games like puzzle and dragons have never had a month where they did not add to its player base. If it lost 10% of its players in a single month, everyone would be fired. I'm not joking. Now before you or anyone says that Pokemon is larger, it's not. Puzzle and Dragons might not be as large in America (it's close though), but in Japan, 10% of their entire population plays the game. More people play that game, probably 3 times over, than play Pokemon Go.
- kearneyandy 10y ago
  The article mentions a drop in Daily users of about 10M (specifies around 12M). This also include any launches that occurred over the last month, which means the retention over this time is likely much worse than just 75% but I don't have numbers on that.
mahranch 10y ago
The sad part is that this is going to be used as a case study in the future on what not to do. I can guarantee it. Every step Niantec has made has been backwards. From removing tracking to making Pokemon harder to catch. The moves they have made are frustrating their players and they're jumping ship as a result.
x1798DE 10y ago
They don't give raw numbers for engagement / time spent in app, but I sorta wonder if that's not a bigger factor than actual lost users. When I would walk around NYC, I would constantly see people playing this game, in the subway, on the streets, etc. I don't think I've seen anyone playing it at all in the past few weeks. Totally anecdotal, but it seems like way more than a 25% drop in people actually actively playing the game. (Though I don't actually play it - maybe the "active" portion of the game mechanics has just changed character).
dlevine 10y ago
I played a lot when Pokemon first came out. But it slowly lost its hold - I found myself gradually playing less and less, and I've pretty much stopped. I think the problem is that there isn't much keeping people around other than catching new Pokemon and leveling up. Both of those things get progressively harder as you go along, removing the incentives to keep playing. Maybe if there were some sort of quest system (and not the achievements) or real social mechanic, people would stick around for longer.
placeybordeaux 10y ago
They released too early with too few low value features.
Kapura 10y ago
Persistent Game Without Endgame Content Loses Users Film at 11
FollowSteph3 10y ago
Wait until school starts...
awrightiv 10y ago
As predicted. The content was too thin, and they're adding more too slowly to keep up with demand. See also: World of Warcraft as an example of a product with a similar problem, albeit a much longer lifecycle.
Khelavaster 10y ago
Pokemon Go used luster purge!
seangrogg 10y ago
As a developer it was the fact that they were so close to the chest with their API that ruined it for me. The game had a lot of cool potential and I really enjoyed it for a while, but eventually it hit the point where there was backlash from the company for doing anything with their (admittedly non-public) API. They should have spent time celebrating what the public was making or even possibly trying to produce an alternative API optimized for consumption (instead of blasting their servers with hundreds of fake accounts to get the necessary data).
michaelfindlay 10y ago
I must admit i played Pokemon Go a little bit, I am sure maybe they could add more elements as time goes, including player vs player tournaments and lobbies. Single player mode with a pokemon of your choice with story line gyms. They just need to re-engage players.
CM30 10y ago
Makes me wonder if some of this was disillusionment after people realised how unbalanced the game was. Because at the moment, it's a game that seems designed specifically to reward city dwellers and punish countryside and suburban folk. If you're in a city, lots of Pokemon seem to appear because it uses mobile signals to place them. In the country where you'd expect Pokemon? Nothing. You can have tall grass for miles, yet get less Pokemon than in a Walmart parking lot. As a result, a lot of people spent ages wandering around and encountering nothing. Or maybe just common Pokemon. The maps helped with this a bit, by giving these people the knowledge to find the few interesting Pokemon that would spawn before they vanish. But without them? There's not really a point for most people in these areas to keep playing. It's a lot of hassle for very little reward. Niantic didn't seem to want to improve this either. They simply said something like 'well, you'll just have to move to where the Pokemon are'. So I wonder if some of the drop may be people living in more remote regions saying 'sod this' and giving up on the game.

209 points by shawndumas 10y ago

Some of it is undoubtedly a craze shedding the least-engaged, but I wonder how much of that could be due to it being August and people not wanting to traipse around in the height of summer. I got interested in the game, but I decided to wait a bit as daily high temperatures hovered at the century mark.

wvenable 10y ago
In other places, August is a comfortable time to traipse around compared to the rest of the year. You want get outdoors when the sun is out and it's warm.
- astrodust 10y ago
  August is turning out to be downright pleasant compared to the hellacious July we had, but that didn't stop people from mobbing the local Pokestop clusters. There's a spot downtown here that's so bad they're debating putting up a fence to contain the players and keep them from interfering with a ferry terminal that's close by: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-ferry-terminal-pokemon-go-moved-away-1.3705865 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-ferry-terminal...
- pseudointellect 10y ago
  Today I learned, weather varies by location. So one person saying weather is bad in place A will likely produce another person to counter them saying weather in place B is okay.
- zeveb 10y ago
  > You want get outdoors when the sun is out and it's warm. Many people, no doubt, but I'd prefer to get outdoors when it's grey and snow is falling. When the sun's out, it burns my skin; when it's above freezing, there can be rain. Cold & snowy is easy to deal with: throw on a coat, a hat and a scarf. Hot is impossible to deal with: cool or die. Actually, even if one cools down, the sun will give one skin cancer. So, really, it's cool and die.

calbear81 10y ago

I am a semi-active Pokemon Go player in the SF Bay Area and I can tell it's definitely died down over the last few weeks. In the beginning, every Friday/Saturday/Sunday night, the whole downtown area would be lured up and people would be out mingling and catching pokemon in the local park. This past weekend, there were only a few lures and a few diehards milling around the park. There's a few dynamics at play based on personal experience: 1) Many players don't care about the gym battling system and just wanted to "collect" Pokemon. Once you've collected most of the ones in your area, you're going to get bored catching the same pidgeys, weedles, and rats/bats. My SO and I have gone to different areas to catch other Pokemon but you just need to go a few times and now we both have "most" of the common Pokemon. We're not hardcore enough to want to spend more time hunting the last few missing in our deck. 2) The lack of support and response from Niantic when the game was badly broken turned off a lot of casual players. Hardcore players will forgive them but casual players especially on iOS expect a lot more polish and "it just works" from a top selling game. I wonder how much of a fit Nintendo threw when this happened given they are a partial owner/investor in "The Pokemon Company". 3) The gym battling system mechanics are not great. You basically can throw bodies at a gym until you knock them down. There's no P2P battling which would make it more exciting since the gym AI is predictable in their attack patterns and most players know the dodge, attack, dodge routine now. The whole premise is to take down a gym, revive your Pokemon, collect potions/revives, do it all over again.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
I agree with everything you say, but I think it all boils down to "it's the PVP, stupid." Imagine if the actual Pokemon games never had trainers outside of gyms. I don't know about you, but after a while it would start to feel like a repetitive chore.
- thatswrong0 10y ago
  Yep. I grew up with Pokemon and didn't even install Pokemon Go.. but if it had legit PvP battling and trading, I would definitely give it a spin. How cool would it be if you were walking down the street with your phone in your pocket.. and all of a sudden it started vibrating, you pick it up - TRAINER BATTLE. You look around, and you see someone else with their phone out looking around too. Now all of a sudden you're in a pokemon battle with a total stranger! So much potential for cool experiences.. and yet they're doing nothing of the sort.

oneloop 10y ago

I've been saying that Pokemon Go is going to go the same way as the Kinect and the Wii. Fun for the novelty, but beyond that the fundamentals are very bad. Therefore, once the novelty starts to wear off....

mkaziz 10y ago
I thought the Wii had great fundamentals. I loved playing a lot of the core Wii games.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  How many of the core wii games used motion controls? Even the big Nintendo IP games used primarily a classical control scheme if not exclusively.
  - whateveracct 10y ago
    Both Mario Galaxies (arguably the best two games on Wii) used motion controls along with buttons+analog stick. It was wonderful and not overdone.
  - minimaxir 10y ago
    The top-selling Wii games were the Wii Sports games + spinoffs, almost all of which were primarily motion-control: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Wii_video_games https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Wii_vid...
    - rtkwe 10y ago
      I think those sales numbers are skewed in favor of Wii Sports because it was bundled with the console the same way The Lab is for the Vive.
      - minimaxir 10y ago
        True; the others were not, though. (Except there may have been a SKU with Wii Sports Resort)

OpenDrapery 10y ago

Anyone remember "Drawing with Friends"? It was all the rage for about 15 minutes.

turingbook 10y ago
It is Foursquare on steroids.
- lispython 10y ago
  Nice metaphor.
nommm-nommm 10y ago
And before that Words with Friends.

kafkaesq 10y ago

As with with any other dopamine-jerking drug -- first there's a rush; then a plateau; then a refactory period. And just like the more familiar (street-level) drug dealers, the creators are going to have to think of something stronger, longer-lasting or at least more novel-seaming in order to maintain market share. Or cede their turf.

AJ007 10y ago
I thought the spike in usage from the beginning was a contrarian indicator for long term popularity. The rapid viral growth clearly saturated the potential playerbase within the first week. Rapid market saturation means you do not have time to test and optimize for long term user retention. Hypothetically you could get all of the variables correct on day one, but unlikely.
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  Didn't they have a beta though? They should have expanded that.

Wheaties466 10y ago

I'm sure the ban wave of legitimate players interest has died down.

TheOneTrueKyle 10y ago

Not everyone is going to be a master

unbelievr 10y ago

On release day, the app itself was great. It had a warmer/colder system with 0-3 paw prints to track down the Pokémons in your vicinity. Hunting down things you missed was a game in itself. When the servers weren't dying, the game was quite responsive too. Fast forward a week, and the warmer/colder system is broken. All the Pokémons are always 3 steps away, which means somewhere within 1km radius. And you have 15 minutes to find that one you're missing. You can still see them from 100 meters away, and the app is quite responsive when you get close to them. The downtime is unbearable at times, and people are losing items they paid real money for due to this. Then we fast forward two weeks. People have started reverse-engineering the internal API and are using it to create maps over nearby Pokémons. The brokenness of the tracking system is acknowledged at some convention (not publicly on their site), but no promises are made on fixing it. Niantic starts sending out C&Ds to projects using their APIs, trying to remove bots and tracking websites. Despite their own tracker being broken. The app is now limited to communicating once per 10 seconds, and you can only see Pokémons 70m around you. After successfully hiring a PR manager, Niantic breaks their deafening silence and tells us that the tracking system will not be fixed. They will replace it with something better. A new app rolls out, now with request signing to combat tracking websites. This takes about 5 days to crack before business returns to usual. People really want to be able to track their Pokémons, and having no ways to do so put a lot of people off. Closing Pokevision made many of my friends quit, because to them, Niantic didn't share their concerns at all. Finally, the tracking system is replaced with a new one. You can now detect nearby Pokémons up to 200m (vs 1000m before). You still need to get within 70m of them to actually see them though. Niantic also activate an extra tracking system in certain American states, as a beta test. This has been active for about two weeks now without hitting the rest of the player base. Unfortunately, it is based on Pokestops, which are user-submitted landmarks from their previous game, Ingress. A lot of places do not have these at all, or extremely few. This makes the game basically unplayable in rural areas, where you'll rapidly run out of items or never find anything interesting. For me, personally, I feel this game has great potential, but I really miss more openness from Niantic. What are their plans for the future? Which concerns are they acknowledging? Which are intentional features of the game, and thus ignored? I think this game basically blew up in their faces, and they weren't ready to handle the interest. It's sad that they let this chance go, because I think it will be extremely hard for them to redeem themselves after this.

wcarss 10y ago

The loss and subsequent banning of maps and map users made nearly everyone I know stop playing, especially in the total absence of an official replacement or a compelling reason to continue. Hearing my map ding was enough cause to make me leap out of my chair and run to the nearby park at midnight to catch something I wanted, and there'd usually be the usual lure-users and a few map-users out there at the same time. Once I was out, I'd play for a while, hit a gym or two, maybe finish an egg, and go home. This was still really fun when it was disabled. Without the map, there's no reason for me to leave my house. There's no group of people at work who stand up when a Blastoise is announced into our #pokemon channel, sending us all on a brief Pokemon/coffee walk down the road. That's all on top of the poor quality of the game, which the maps and community had overcome. Niantic being selfish and not understanding their own game or the culture around it seems to have squandered one of the greatest opportunities a company has ever had. (I get that the maps were spamming them, but that's a technical challenge. A bunch of well funded ex-googlers ought to be up to the challenge of scaling/handling unexpected load for a chance like this.)

cheald 10y ago
This is on the money. Niantic made it harder and more frustrating to play their game, and people stopped playing it. They have utterly failed to understand what their playerbase wants, and people are falling off. The maps really drove it into overdrive, especially with the presence of "nests", because it allowed people to figure out where they needed to be, and would then congregate there. By taking out the maps, Niantic has turned their scavenger hunt into a scratch-off lotto ticket - don't bother trying to plan or play with any strategy, just wander around aimlessly until your phone buzzes. Who wants to do that? It's a shame, because at its core there is a compelling scavenger hunt that generated a truly unique social phenomenon, and it's very sad to see Niantic just piss that away. The game just isn't worth putting any effort into - they broke the effort-reward cycle.
- nathankleyn 10y ago
  It's particularly aggravating playing it in a large city (for us London) where, without the maps as a guide, you're stuck wasting balls on common Pokémon incessantly because that's the only thing around. Add to that the fact that they made it, with a recent update, insanely likely for anything half-decent to simply run or be impossible to catch, and you have a recipe for declining interest in playing and paying to be bored.

kin 10y ago

It was an awesome phenomena to witness while it lasted. Sadly this is how it is with most games. People get bored if there's no stream of content to keep them engaged. Other games stay on top for so long by continuing to have in-game specials, events, and deals as well as DLC. Everything from Niantic since release has honestly just been catch-up and bug fixes.

120bits 10y ago

This is what I have noticed in just my friend circle. I was never an active Pokemon Go player, but few of my friends were really into the game. Every Friday we would go out for a walk, in near by park and they will have their phone out and be catching Pokemons. I guess it was just how much more I can catch thing. They always wanted to get the rares ones. Who doesn't right? Last 2 weekends I have noticed 2 of my friends didn't care much. And, slowly, the interest faded away. Now we all going for paint ball. I don't know if it's Ninatic not coming up with good updates or its just a common thing with every mobile game. Angry birds, Candy crush and now Pokemon Go?

wott 10y ago
> I was never > Every Friday we would > They always wanted > Last 2 weekends I have noticed 2 of my friends didn't care much. And, slowly, the interest faded away. "Every", "always", "slowly", and the overall feeling of a long tradition. Er... guys... can you remind us how long this fad lasted? When was it introduced? 6 years ago? 6 months ago? No, that's 6 weeks ago, men! So, 2 weeks ago was just 4 weeks after the beginning... Is it the CADT at work, describing an extremely short, transient fling about a lousy game as a tradition? I was amazed by people pretending this was (another) revolution in gaming and life, that allowed them to socialize (ever heard of walking down to your local bar? apparently not) and to take a walk (wow). And now, just one month after all that fuss, it's already scrapped and life goes on as it was before that was a thing. Or was it never a thing and people rushed into making theories about it without thinking further than their nose? That would be surprising. Ahem.
- 120bits 10y ago
  I think I was more focusing on the rise and fall of famous "mobile gaming" in general. There was time everyone I knew was into Angry Birds. Every guy I meet tells me how their wife or gf are into candy crush and just addicted to it. And now everyone has jumped on the Pokemon go bandwagon. Hence, the interest fading away eventually. This is just what I have noticed among the people I know.
- Gargoyle 10y ago
  So, to be clear, you think the basic mechanic of geography based gaming (there must be a better name for it) is a fad and it's already fading? I strongly disagree. In my opinion what we just saw was the initial burst of public enjoyment of that game mechanic, and now that the concept has very widespread familiarity, the ground is set for better games to come along and dwarf Pokemon Go. It actually was a revolutionary moment, but it seems many want to assume the initial burst was the big bang. I think that's very wrong.

technofiend 10y ago

Unlike the predecessor app there's no strategy to Go and just like the predecessor app lots of lazy people want to ruin the game for everyone else by cheating through GPS spoofing, automated game play and data scraping. Not to mention both games share Niantic's less-than-stellar customer service which means issues are addressed haphazardly if at all. The good news is I think the market's broken wide open for another AR app, hopefully one with more compelling gameplay that isn't structured to be the next Farmville/Game Of War/whatever in app purchase digital cash cow.

djsumdog 10y ago

I feel like this is a case, "No shit, what did you think would happen?" It is a free-to-play game after all. I'd suggest watching the developer of Braid talk about free-to-play games. He compares them to 90's syndicated TV shows, each one being independent and leaving you with a cliffhanger prior to each commercial break. When HBO started producing long running series that would eventually be released on VHS and DVD, you saw much more long arching story. Even though Pokemon Go has a lot more going for it than many other free-to-play games, it still works on a model that limits how far you can go without buying stuff. That's how those game companies make money. I met a Pikpok dev once who said 80% of people delete their games once you can't really advance without buying stuff. A couple spend $80 ~ $200 (more than they would on a traditional title) and a few, the "Whales," would dump $2k upwards into these games. They depended on those players to make the games profitable. Free-to-play are like quarter-based arcade games .. on your phone. They're a pretty big step backwards in gaming.

vlunkr 10y ago
While I mostly agree, I wouldn't say they are entirely a step backwards. Pokemon Go broke the mold and did something that would not really work on any past platform.
- tux1968 10y ago
  I have never played Pokemon Go, but i'm curious what mold it broke? Ingress was around a long time previously and as far as i've surmised contains essentially all the features of Go plus some more. What it lacked was the compelling and nostalgic branding that Pokemon has. Genuinely curious.
  - icefox 10y ago
    Shops paid to put lures out, it was a way to get advertisers to pay for the game, but without spam ads.
  - vlunkr 10y ago
    Yes, in some ways PGo is a re-skin of Ingress, But I felt like it was much more accessible. It appeals to a massive demographic.

cowholio4 10y ago

It's still pretty big in Taiwan. All this for a Snorlax! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoYjVTbLWyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoYjVTbLWyo [EDIT: Removed pvp mention because I couldn't find a source]

reustle 10y ago
Also huge in Bangkok still. I see people with matching Pokemon Go tshirts, there are loads of lures around Siam in the afternoon, and hundreds of people camped out all over the malls playing for hours (particularly outside Siam Paragon).
- wsc981 10y ago
  Then again the game was only introduced in Thailand at the start of august.

StavrosK 10y ago

I only started playing because my friends did, and the only way for me to stomach the boring game was to write a bot for it. I enjoyed going around and getting levels with a bot, trying to figure out how to best evolve my Pokemon automatically, write inventory management scripts, etc. After they deleted my account for that (fair enough), I uninstalled the app. I wasn't going to run around catching and releasing Rattatas all the time, as the game is one of the most grindy games I've ever seen, but there's pretty much nothing else to do in the game either.

NDizzle 10y ago

They drastically changed some algorithms to (seemingly) make more money. They made the pokemon break free MUCH more often with the update about 10 days ago. You now have to use way more pokeballs to capture things. So much to the point that it's unfun. I don't live near a pokestop so I can't top up quickly. Another thing they did was make it so the pokemon disappear if a range check puts you far enough away from the point of initial contact. Combine that together and nobody can play the game in the car anymore, even if you're not driving! So they spent a bunch of time changing existing features to be less fun without adding any new features that are fun. Not a good idea. I have been playing with my wife and two of my kids. We all stopped playing because it's simply not fun anymore.

mjevans 10y ago
The update also (at least on my Nexus 6P) made GPS related issues dramatically worse; it's like they don't comprehend that in a place with a lot of tall buildings or trees you're not going to get a 'solid' GPS lock a majority of the time. Combine that with a UI popup (mid capture interaction no less) that steels input focus (it stops your ball toss), telling the user something they LITERALLY have no control over fixing, and quite possibly ruining your chance at capturing a more rare Pokemon and it is insanely frustrating.
- riskable 10y ago
  The GPS issues have nothing to do with getting a GPS fix. It's just a plain ol' bug. My GPS is spot-on when using any app other than Pokémon Go which pretty regularly states that the GPS isn't working when I'm holding my phone in my hands to an open sky with no clouds. It doesn't matter what I'm doing or what device I'm using it always shows that GPS error message every 30 seconds to 1 minute.
  - squeaky-clean 10y ago
    > The GPS issues have nothing to do with getting a GPS fix. It's just a plain ol' bug. GPS on phones aren't that accurate, especially downtown, but most applications will filter the data because of that. Ever use Google Maps for directions and make a turn different from what the app is telling you to do? Your car icon will continue down the "correct" path for 15-30 seconds before re-adjusting to the new route. This actually happens all the time, it's just more likely that your GPS is misreporting you as 20m east instead of you taking a different turn, so the app holds off on updating the display until it is more sure. So it's a combination of the two factors. But most apps handle it muuuuch better than P:GO does. Here's a link I was able to find on running apps specifically. Apps that deal with you being on foot will obviously have a harder time determining exactly where you are, as opposed to apps for driving where you're moving faster, in a straight line, and down a grid of streets. http://radianttap.com/blog/2012/comparing-accuracy-of-the-gps-based-running-apps/ http://radianttap.com/blog/2012/comparing-accuracy-of-the-gp...

timmytokyo 10y ago

I think it just comes down to the game being not very good. It's not really designed for retention. Once you've caught the Pokemons you care about, there's not much left to do. Gyms are not an interesting mechanic, and there's no other way to interact with other players in the game. Basically, Niantic put out a half-baked game, which was rapidly successful only because it built on the combination of a fantastic idea (AR gaming) and a cherished IP (Pokemon).

dom96 10y ago

I'm honestly surprised that there is still 30M users playing. The original tracking system they had in the game was fine, it worked well and I mostly enjoyed playing the game with it. Can anybody shed some light as to why they removed it?

BryantD 10y ago

Note: still the top grossing app in the iOS App Store. As always, don't forget to put the scary raw numbers into context. 12 million out of 45 million means they've retained 73% of their user base month over month. We can't derive actual retention numbers from that because new users, etc. but 15% is great month over month retention for a F2P mobile game. Assume Pokemon Go is doing that. That would mean 6.5M of their current user base stuck around since the beginning of August, and they picked up just under 25M new users in one month. I dunno about you, but I'd be really pleased if my new game got 25M new users in the second month after release. Not as good as the 45M I got in the first month, but that's not rationally sustainable. Time spent in game dropping is bad. DAU dropping is bad. I wouldn't spin this as good news. Niantic could absolutely be managing live operations much better. But click bait is click bait. If you're sitting here saying that it's failing because everyone you know stopped playing, you need to figure out how to make your mental model explain why it's still top grossing.

wsc981 10y ago
In august the game became available in Thailand, a potential huge new user base. Perhaps the game opened up in other parts of the world as well. This could mean the percentage of users playing dropped by a much bigger amount in existing countries.
- BryantD 10y ago
  Thailand is not a big mobile game marketplace in comparison to the US, China, Japan, or Europe. However, you make a good point -- the numbers lose even more context when they're not broken down by country, particularly when the launch was staggered. E.g., Pokemon Go launched in Japan on July 21st, which means any numbers captured at the beginning of August reflect initial launch volumes.
dade_ 10y ago
And some casual players, myself included, just haven't been keeping up on the constant app updates so it won't let me connect. I usually collect the little monsters on my evening walk or errands. It's amusing and I think they still have a great opportunity. Also amusing is visiting a certain message board to read posts that complain about a new application's features while most are doing agile development and releasing MVPs themselves.

jedberg 10y ago

With winter, and the colder weather, approaching, they really better figure out some game mechanics that you can do inside at home, or that user number is going to drop like crazy. I've been saying this for a while -- it was fun to play for a few days, but I live in a suburb. I have to walk at least .5 miles to get to a Pokestop and they never spawn near my house. I'll still play when I go to new places, but that's about it. Now, if there were some way for my wife and I to battle each other at home, that would be whole different ball game.

hackernews2000 10y ago
The weather is going to get warmer on the opposite side of the world from you.
- Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
  Depending on how the battles with his wife go, it could get a whole lot colder!
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- graywh 10y ago
  But that's only about 12% of the world's population. And even less are below the tropics.
- jedberg 10y ago
  True but there are a lot fewer people on that side of the world, and even fewer still who would be considered "1st world" enough to have the spare time and the smartphones with data plans necessary to play.
  - hackernews2000 10y ago
    Your stereotypes are disgusting. My working class relatives in Brazil are playing it. We don't live in huts.

Brendinooo 10y ago

Anecdotal, but I'm still playing pretty regularly and still greatly enjoy the game. I like having the app open when I'm on a run. I can hatch eggs, take a breather at gyms, and pick up a lot of Pokemon. Tracking was never an integral part of my game experience, which is maybe why I didn't feel as affected by the changes. I never completely understood the complaints. Niantic has a right to make a (free-to-play!) game and don't owe us anything. And since this is a dev-centric community, many of us can appreciate how stressed out Niantic engineers probably are right now after a difficult launch. I get that maps were cool - I have a nice Dragonite to show for it, but it always felt like a hack that was going to go away. The old tracking system was better, but I'd rather have the performance of August than the tracking system of July. Losing users was probably inevitable. This game was everywhere in the news, so I'm sure plenty of people tried it out and realized it wasn't for them. Combine that with people who miss their maps as well as maybe adjusting the numbers after catching bots, and that probably covers most of the numbers.

mahranch 10y ago
You say tracking was never an integral part of your game experience and then say you don't understand the complaints. Heh. That's what a vast majority of people are complaining about because tracking was an integral part of their game experience. That's the reason so many of us liked the game to begin with. Imagine if a game like Soul Caliber or Street Fighter took away the fighting aspect of their game. You may think the main fun part of soul caliber is unlocking stronger/hidden weapons, or selecting the right match-up in street fighter, but a majority of people enjoy the combat aspect. I continued to play after they took out tracking because I thought it was only temporary. Now I finally realize it's permanent so I haven't logged in to Pokemon Go in 7 days now.

hkmurakami 10y ago

No matter what happens to Pokemon Go, Nintendo has proved to the world that its IP is immensely powerful and valuable in the mobile age. That's a nice weapon to have to shut up "analysts" who always want them to take the path to short term gains. I remain bearish on Pokemon go and bullish on Nintendo.

jmcdiesel 10y ago
Its not their IP though, is it? Its the Pokemon Company, and nintendo only gets a small percentage of the licensing...
- stormbrew 10y ago
  Nintendo owns 33% of TPC. But they also own some amount of Creatures Inc, which owns 33% of TPC (Gamefreak is the other third share). So it's not clear how much control they have over pokemon, but it may in fact be a controlling interest. Never mind that not all shares are voting shares. I'd be pretty surprised if Nintendo weren't at least de facto in control of Pokemon, personally.
  - hkmurakami 10y ago
    In addition, Pokemon is not the only strong IP that Nintendo has in its arsenal. I was in the audience at a Hironobu Sakaguchi interview recently, and one of the things that has stayed with me was that Nintendo told the FF team back in the 90's, "You need to take better care of your characters." Nintendo has certainly done that for itself over the course of many decades, and it's always paid off for them despite many short term troubles they've encountered.

IhateMicrosoft 10y ago

I was banned for using a 'map' as this violated the terms of service. And this left me with no other way to play the game but to violate the terms of service. So you know what - I don't play anymore and Niantic created that situation; not me. What did they think I would do if they left me without a way to play without violating the 'ToS?'

betadreamer 10y ago

I still play regular but it is getting pretty mundane. But that is not because pokevision and other 3rd party was banned. In fact they were supposed to be banned a lot earlier. The map users (myself included) will never pay for pokemongo but might pay for the map. This is not a good business model for them and in fact it defeats the purpose. Instead of hunting or seeking you are basically shopping. The reason why it is getting boring is actually something else... it is in the flaw of their game design. This game is extremely biased toward people who live around water with high density such as Santa Monica and San Francisco. You can catch Dragonite and bunch of starters there. But most people instead will catch eevee and growlithe at the best. Basically after a while you finish catching every pokemon around you and there is nothing else to do other than fight gyms. But gyms are so easy to beat that you don't have much incentive to defend it.

fl0wenol 10y ago
Agreed. The process by which you fortify gyms is broken. Leveling up your gym is very time-consuming and can too easily be undone, especially by other players nearby. There needs to be a better way to handle gyms and battles that scales with local user activity... perhaps a shunt to a PvP mode that grants the winner or the winner's color a certain amount of exclusive access time to fortify. The game is not similar enough to Ingress for the existing tit-for-tat ideas to work. Fire XMPs <=> Gym Battle; Add Resonators to Portal <=> Put Champion on Gym. Where's the equivalent of shields or key-based recharging at a distance? Why can't I buff my pokemon stationed on a gym (or the gym itself) with items after an alert that the gym is being battled?
- betadreamer 10y ago
  This is a great idea. They should have an item that buffs the gym for 24hr. This will create a nice mechanics where you want to put your pokemon on these buffed gym (more incentive to train) and it will be challenging to beat in general. Players that beats the gym also gets more XP.

take_it_online 10y ago

There were so many other ways they could have made money with the scaling issue they had. If their servers can not handled the amount of users using the map function to track pokemon, set this feature as an item. Once a day a user can track pokemon for 1-2 30min session a day. Then if users want an extra session to track pokemon, they would only have to pay a few pokecoins. This way they can please the userbase and easy the resources used.

jagger27 10y ago

If there's one thing The Pokemon Company and Gamefreak can do well it's to iterate. There will always be an opportunity for Nintendo to make an in-house sequel. Niantic can and should be cut out of the picture in the future.

echelon 10y ago
Why should Niantic be cut out? Nintendo owns a (large?) share of them. They could become a second party, like Retro Studios.
- ben_jones 10y ago
  If Niantic management is responsible (I mean they are but did they make wrong decisions, or did they make ok decisions in bad circumstances?) you can argue that keeping that same management involved in a sequel could be detrimental to the evolution of the game. It also makes it harder to shed the failures of the first iteration. Personally I think Niantic's entire team was plain overwhelmed and failed to adapt. Some decisions were made for money, and you can argue that they were unnecessary, but their is also no doubt a lot of people worked really hard and tried their best to make it work. There is of course value in that experience that can be applied to future iterations. The future looks great for AR at least.

Mister_Snuggles 10y ago

I hope they add some more stuff to the game to keep it fresh and interesting. As it is, I've caught Pokemon, won Gym Battles, lost Gym Battles, evolved Pokemon, visited hundreds of Pokestops, and Hatched Eggs. I think I've touched on every game mechanic, though I haven't caught every Pokemon. I'd like to see some things that allow the players more ways to change the map in a way that interacts with other players. Right now that's only done by Gym Battles and by placing Lures in Pokestops. Some of the ideas I've got are: - Some way for players to place markers on the map to indicate that Pokemon have seen, rally players to a spot, etc. - A way for players to create new Pokestops. - Some kind of quest mechanic where players could create quests and embark on quests created by others. All of these could be tied to the in-game purchase system. They'd need some way to prevent abuse of it, of course. The biggest problem I have is that it feels very much like a single-player game, and a fairly shallow one at that, with some very minor multiplayer elements.

NamTaf 10y ago

The game consists of 2 mechanics: 1) Collect everything 2) Battle gyms for arbitrary cred at the moment, both oppose each other because the maps people make to make #1 easier, make it easier for a subset of people to dominate #2 easier. By removing the maps that make #2 so unbalanced, #1 becomes a repetitive chore. There's literally nothing more to the game than those two mechanics. There's no end goal like the other pokemon games. There's no higher goal to work towards from capturing gyms and holding areas. It's no surprise that the game is dying. Either you collect the 80% that are easy to find and then it just becomes a huge chore without the necessary tools to find the last 20%, or you powerlevel up to fight in gyms for a bit and then... what exactly? Niantic should've taken another 3-6 months of heavy dev time to really polish it and add more depth to it. Create a higher purpose for holding gyms. Create a more compelling search mechanism that doesn't allow maps but then doesn't make the last 20% of the search such a huge, completely random-chance chore. There needs to be more to the game than those two mechanics and every moment it's released but there's not, it just withers. No amount of patching in an IV% calculator by visiting your 'trainer' will help that, because it still just relies on those two very broken pillars.

vacri 10y ago
This was the problem with Niantic's earlier game Ingress. It was fun to play while levelling up, which masked some of the repetitive nature of the game, but once you reached the highest level, there was nothing else to do except keep doing what you were already doing. The problem with all of these kinds of games (MMOs in particular) is that people consume content far faster than it can be created. It's quite difficult to create self-sustaining content.
- Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
  This is why they need a way for players to create this content somehow. Look at the success that Quake and Doom saw with people making maps, mods, full-blown total conversions, etc. I don't think going that extreme applies to Pokemon Go, but it's an example of how players can create the content that prolongs the life of the game. What I'd like to see is ways for players to do things that have lasting effects on the map. Whether it's moving Pokestops, or making Gyms have some higher purpose, or something I can't think of, I'm not sure. Right now it's a fairly shallow single-player game that has some extremely minor (Gyms and Lures) multiplayer mechanics.

overgard 10y ago

I'm not an expert on this, but, those numbers don't seem awful to me. I realize not everyone started the game at the exact same time, but retaining 75% of your users a month later seems pretty good. Pretty much any mobile game is going to have some churn, and given their stratospheric launch it's not like they were realistically going to grow. Given the (MAJOR!) quality problems they've had, they can probably stem the bleeding quite a bit if they just fix those things.

mahranch 10y ago
Mobile games like puzzle and dragons have never had a month where they did not add to its player base. If it lost 10% of its players in a single month, everyone would be fired. I'm not joking. Now before you or anyone says that Pokemon is larger, it's not. Puzzle and Dragons might not be as large in America (it's close though), but in Japan, 10% of their entire population plays the game. More people play that game, probably 3 times over, than play Pokemon Go.
kearneyandy 10y ago
The article mentions a drop in Daily users of about 10M (specifies around 12M). This also include any launches that occurred over the last month, which means the retention over this time is likely much worse than just 75% but I don't have numbers on that.

mahranch 10y ago

The sad part is that this is going to be used as a case study in the future on what not to do. I can guarantee it. Every step Niantec has made has been backwards. From removing tracking to making Pokemon harder to catch. The moves they have made are frustrating their players and they're jumping ship as a result.

x1798DE 10y ago

They don't give raw numbers for engagement / time spent in app, but I sorta wonder if that's not a bigger factor than actual lost users. When I would walk around NYC, I would constantly see people playing this game, in the subway, on the streets, etc. I don't think I've seen anyone playing it at all in the past few weeks. Totally anecdotal, but it seems like way more than a 25% drop in people actually actively playing the game. (Though I don't actually play it - maybe the "active" portion of the game mechanics has just changed character).

dlevine 10y ago

I played a lot when Pokemon first came out. But it slowly lost its hold - I found myself gradually playing less and less, and I've pretty much stopped. I think the problem is that there isn't much keeping people around other than catching new Pokemon and leveling up. Both of those things get progressively harder as you go along, removing the incentives to keep playing. Maybe if there were some sort of quest system (and not the achievements) or real social mechanic, people would stick around for longer.

placeybordeaux 10y ago

They released too early with too few low value features.

Kapura 10y ago

Persistent Game Without Endgame Content Loses Users Film at 11

FollowSteph3 10y ago

Wait until school starts...

awrightiv 10y ago

As predicted. The content was too thin, and they're adding more too slowly to keep up with demand. See also: World of Warcraft as an example of a product with a similar problem, albeit a much longer lifecycle.

Khelavaster 10y ago

Pokemon Go used luster purge!

seangrogg 10y ago

As a developer it was the fact that they were so close to the chest with their API that ruined it for me. The game had a lot of cool potential and I really enjoyed it for a while, but eventually it hit the point where there was backlash from the company for doing anything with their (admittedly non-public) API. They should have spent time celebrating what the public was making or even possibly trying to produce an alternative API optimized for consumption (instead of blasting their servers with hundreds of fake accounts to get the necessary data).

michaelfindlay 10y ago

I must admit i played Pokemon Go a little bit, I am sure maybe they could add more elements as time goes, including player vs player tournaments and lobbies. Single player mode with a pokemon of your choice with story line gyms. They just need to re-engage players.

CM30 10y ago

Makes me wonder if some of this was disillusionment after people realised how unbalanced the game was. Because at the moment, it's a game that seems designed specifically to reward city dwellers and punish countryside and suburban folk. If you're in a city, lots of Pokemon seem to appear because it uses mobile signals to place them. In the country where you'd expect Pokemon? Nothing. You can have tall grass for miles, yet get less Pokemon than in a Walmart parking lot. As a result, a lot of people spent ages wandering around and encountering nothing. Or maybe just common Pokemon. The maps helped with this a bit, by giving these people the knowledge to find the few interesting Pokemon that would spawn before they vanish. But without them? There's not really a point for most people in these areas to keep playing. It's a lot of hassle for very little reward. Niantic didn't seem to want to improve this either. They simply said something like 'well, you'll just have to move to where the Pokemon are'. So I wonder if some of the drop may be people living in more remote regions saying 'sod this' and giving up on the game.