5 ms·
It's wild to me that Pokémon GO is still so profitable. The way it penetrated the mainstream years ago was crazy to witness (people of all ages just walking aro
by Solvency 3y ago
It's wild to me that Pokémon GO is still so profitable. The way it penetrated the mainstream years ago was crazy to witness (people of all ages just walking around town playing it). Then it just sort of vanished from public daily life, but somehow it lives on much more discretely.
- grogenaut 3y agoI have a poke stop next to my house. I see random cars pulled up there all hours of the night. I'm not worried about any robbers at this point. It's always someone looking at their phone for about 5-10 minutes and driving off. Last week there was a dude there in the dark. I just yelled out from my driveway (100 feet away) "you catch em all"... response was a sigh and "not yet". Guy was gone 3 minutes later. It's like the video game equivalent of a smoke break at this point. Just a little thing to do. There's a QA guy at the bar by my house who has 5 phones with him when he's drinking. 3 are pokemon, 2 are for work... 50% tho on if he works for niantic, hope he's still got a job. I live real close to their seattle office.
- entropie 3y ago> Then it just sort of vanished from public daily life, but somehow it lives on much more discretely. Its actually the same with ingress. At least it was before PG. I screenshoted the actual intel map. Thos connection between points are very very hard to achieve especially between continents. https://i.imgur.com/3ZmLfUj.png https://i.imgur.com/3ZmLfUj.png The scene is very active, still. Here in germany the same old guys play this game for years now. They drive around in vans with USB connectors and filled with like 6 people. Its actually a cool way to find friends and interact with people if you are a nerd.
- technofiend 3y agoThere's still a very active Ingress community in my area which is both good and bad. Good if you want to play because you can get some friends together and frack for high level gear, good because friendly competition makes the game stronger since progress relies in part on turnover. Bad, unfortunately, because some of the most hard core players are the most toxic. We're talking people who run multiple accounts, stalk players, scrape data to ensure (back when that was a thing) you could never get a guardian, location spoof, etc. Like a lot of other games (Eve Online, for example) the lack of sharding favors the trolls. And by trolls I mean the people who clearly consider the most fun part of the game to be ruining it for everyone else.
- ourmandave 3y agoI was hardcore Ingress from nearly day one. Submitting portals and planning day trips around portal locations. It was all about chasing levels, so once I reached level 8 the spell wore off and I haven't been back.
- donalhunt 3y agoThey added 8 more levels and the ability to recurse (essentially start from L1 on either team again but keep your all-time AP). Just saying... Go Resistance!
- PaulHoule 3y agoTheir next big game is https://monsterhunternow.com/en https://monsterhunternow.com/en it would be fun to see "Monster Hunter" get some more exposure in the West, it's got an approach to character development different from the average RPG where you don't level up but instead progress through getting better equipment and "gitting gud". It is so much easier to keep an online game running than it is to launch a new one, that's some of why I was shocked by Meta shutting down Echo VR. Sure they don't think Echo VR has the potential to get big enough to move the needle for them, but there's a lot of risk a new game won't get any traction at all.
- tmpz22 3y agoHaving a small enthralled group of gamers is enough to make a lot of money. There are many, many, communities playing old online games serviced by small studios or as side projects of larger corporations. Its a shame seemingly our entire industry has adopted a "Make 10s of Billions or GTFO" mentality for its projects. A lot is being lost by ignoring the "make a small beloved product" route.
- mistrial9 3y agosame with book publishing, in a previous cycle. Book publishing is in the cancer treatment center here in the USA.
- slg 3y ago>Its a shame seemingly our entire industry has adopted a "Make 10s of Billions or GTFO" mentality for its projects. I don't know what industry "ours" is referring to in this context because this has happened to practically every industry.
- xeromal 3y agoOurs = Tech Startups.
- downrightmike 3y agoIt disappeared because they changed the game to require more grinding and more hassle. They tweaked the skinner box to the point people weren't excited to play it, so they stopped.
- mrguyorama 3y agoBecause the point is not to have a billion casual players, but rather tens of thousands of whales to milk extensively. The ROI of catering to casual people who might see a couple ads and never spend a dime is just silly compared to taking thousands of dollars a month from tens of thousands of addicts.
- fidotron 3y agoPeople outside the media, and games especially, underestimate the value of a big cross-media IP. If you end up working on them you find they are orders of magnitude larger in revenue terms and the spikiness of the business (in terms of surges of new users without needing advertising etc.) is unbelievable. The downside is the cost of entry is enormous. The surprising part is which IPs have these hungry fanbases is not immediately obvious. I know some of those affected today are well aware of this and would assume that for whatever reason the dots didn't join up between the NBA or Marvel audiences and the sort of games Niantic make.
- jrumbut 3y agoThe NBA one could be fun! Imagine having to search around for public basketball hoops and film yourself shooting threes.
- sahila 3y agoWas that the concept? That sounds like a painful grind to me; there's not _that_ many basketball hoops all next to each other walking distance and then you have to carry a ball around too!
- kevinmchugh 3y agoIt would also probably annoy non-players something fierce. The basketball courts near me are popular.
- jrumbut 3y agoI was just making a joke, I kind of like the idea though!
- aardvarkr 3y agoit’s far more likely it was just a reskin of Pokémon go but you’re trying to collect players instead, and to recruit them you’d have to shoot virtual baskets or something by flicking a basketball instead of a pokeball
- 3y ago
- nonameiguess 3y agoI don't think they ever needed the enormous crowds. That was helpful for getting the word out that the game existed and now everyone knows, but the truly devoted Pokemon fans are maniacs about it, and enough people are willing to spend either enormous time, enormous money, or both to keep playing. The core audience that grew up with this stuff is also mid-40s now, in the career stage where they finally have a lot of disposable income and probably young kids at the right age to introduce them to Pokemon, too. The IP on its own is so valuable, I'm not even sure the game itself needs to be that good.
- marssaxman 3y agoI have seen people playing it on the bus twice in the past week!
- pid-1 3y agoIt's a pay to win grindfest with little new content to keep people playing.
- jonathankoren 3y agoWhat? How can be “pay to win”, when it’s not even competitive, nor with annoyances like FarmVille timers?
- plagiarist 3y agoThe competition is in collecting the rare palletswapped ones with perfect stats.
- jonathankoren 3y agoThat’s a self imposed goal, and has zero relevance to buying anything. It’s literally random.
- coldpie 3y agoIt's definitely still quite popular. I see others on the bus playing it a few times a week.
- fullshark 3y agoIs there any battling? You collect Pokemon in real world locations...that's kind of neat..but what's the game beyond collecting pokemon and bragging about all the different ones you've collected?