Pokemon Go Becomes Biggest Mobile Game In US History (techcrunch.com) 174
An anonymous reader writes: Pokemon Go is now the biggest mobile game of all time in the U.S. Not only has it surpassed Twitter's daily users, but it is seeing people spend more time in its app than in Facebook. An earlier report from SimilarWeb says Pokemon Go has surpassed Tinder in terms of installations -- the app surpassed Tinder on July 7th. Today, the tracking firm says Pokemon Go has managed to surpass Twitter in terms of daily active users on Monday. It says almost 6% of the entire U.S. Android population is engaging with the app on a daily basis. A new report from SurveyMonkey intelligence indicated that Pokemon Go has claimed the title "biggest mobile game in U.S. history." The game saw just under 21 million daily active users in the U.S. on Monday. It's reportedly closing in on Snapchat on Android, and could surpass Google Maps on Android as well. According to app store intelligence firm SensorTower, the average iPhone user on iOS spent 33 minutes catching Pokemon, which is more than any other apps it analyzed, including Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, and Slither.io. The app with the second-most average usage at 22 minutes, 8 seconds, was Facebook. SurveyMonkey did note that Pokemon Go still falls short of other games when it comes to time spent in games. Game of War sees nearly 2 hours of total daily usage for the average user, while Candy Crush Saga sees daily usage of about 43 minutes. In just two days, Pokemon Go brought Nintendo's market value to $7.5 billion. It's worth noting that it remains to be seen whether or not the game will continue to break records or turn into a ghost town like Nintendo's first mobile game, Miitomo.
Re:Meh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Meh (Score:4, Insightful)
As Sheldon put it, the beauty of having online friends is not having to meet them. Why would I want to meet these people only to remind me that I'm like them?
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P2W (Score:2)
Re: P2W (Score:2)
At least the game is winnable.
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It feels like the first truly social game, not play alone with strangers in the basement.
Have you heard of Ingress, Niantic's other social game? www.ingress.com
Yes, I'm somewhat bitter about Pokemon Go and the players overtaking the areas I play for Ingress. The unfortunate, but obvious decision was to use the same location for portals in Ingress, for pokestops and gyms in Pokemon Go. Pokemon Go is less of a social game when compared to Ingress. Pokemon Go is also a game that will be ruined by cheaters and people who pay to play. Ingress has it's fair share of cheaters but you can't buy things
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There's 21 million daily users...even a tiny percentage of them sometimes spending money adds up quickly.
Re:Meh (Score:4, Interesting)
By a staggering coincidence, there is a PokeStop at my local bar. For $0.80 worth of virtual currency, the bartender can activate a "lure" - the lure draws pokemon to spawn at the bar, and the pokemon and the alcohol (or food - a patio restaurant with the patio within range of a Pokestop is SUPER EFFECTIVE) combined draw humon to ... well, they walk to the bar, and what they do after they're too drunk to catch Pokemon isn't really any of our business. As long as they pay while they're eating and drinking.
To math it out in full: $0.80 for a lure, 30 minutes. So about $10 in costs for the restaurant if it wants to cover lunch/dinner. If it brings in just one more customer to shop there instead of their competitor half a block away - the restauranteur makes money. (The customer has spent $20 for an hour-long meal, during which they grab about 1000 XP worth of gaming per user, plus 12 5-minute-cooldown-regulated hits at the Pokestop, each typically yielding $0.30 worth of Pokeballs, postions, and other virtual goods.)
Win-win situation. Customer who was going to eat a $20 meal gets $1 worth of virtual trinkets from Niantic. Proprietor pays $1.60 to attract as many customers as play the game. But even if it's just one person sitting at a table alone, that's $20 in revenue and even at a 50% markup on the food, about $10 in profit. Net win for Proprietor is at least $8.40.
No Math (Score:2)
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You're assuming that all revenue goes to gains, whereas only a relatively small portion is actually the operating margin. Then there's the fact that customers may lay down their own lures if the proprietor does nothing.
I imagine there's probably still a net benefit, but it's not quite as clear as you claim here. The largest benefit would probably coming from geeky spots (e.g. gaming bars) having regular events (e.g. Wednesday night Pokemon).
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I'm not even saying those in a bitter tone, those are pretty much the well-known, widely understood foundations of freemium.
Re:Meh (Score:4, Insightful)
If you are willing to pay not to play the game, then why are you playing the game? Honestly, I never understood that.
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That's a generous example, usually the game is more bullshit than that and it's best to walk away.
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Novelty will wear off (Score:2, Insightful)
eventually and people will move on to other things.
Anyone remember the Nintendo Wii craze when it first came out?
Re:Novelty will wear off (Score:4, Funny)
eventually and people will move on to other things.
Anyone remember the Nintendo Wii craze when it first came out?
Or sex with the wife / what Al Bundy would had said.
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No, I honestly can't say I remember something like that.
Re:Novelty will wear off (Score:5, Funny)
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Yeah, I'm sure people will eventually get bored of pokemon...
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Still play my Wii
Re:Novelty will wear off (Score:5, Insightful)
Americans getting exercise finally (Score:1)
Isn't this a good thing?
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They said the same about the Kinect. It lasted ... what, 3 months?
And this is even worse. What good is the "exercise" of going from one Pokestop to the next when they are shared between Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts and Burger King?
Re:Americans getting exercise finally (Score:5, Insightful)
I know this might sound crazy, but it is possible to walk past a coffee shop, bakery, and even a fast-food restaurant without stopping to stuff your face with a 1000 calorie snack.
I swear, it's true.
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Judging from what I saw in the US I thought it's against the law or something.
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Plus it has been about 110 lately, so they are all out in the parks at night... maybe there is a vampire angle on it
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Microsoft (Score:2)
They said the same about the Kinect. It lasted ... what, 3 months?
What interests me is how Microsoft seems to have again missed the boat after being a pioneer in augmented reality with their HoloLens. A replay of earlier failures to press home their market-leader status in pocket and larger touch-screen devices, in gestural interfaces, and in web browsers.
They seem to have a fixation on big lost battles like search and their own phone ecosystem, rather than exploiting and continuing to perfect their innovations. They develop exciting things, but move on while they're s
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Large corporations are usually not very innovative. For good reason. They have SUCH a baggage of bureaucracy to haul about that the risk becomes unacceptable. Don't forget, that programmer that produces something has to carry a load of lawyers, finance guys, managers and a lot of other dead weight, so whatever he produces MUST be profitable. Innovation, that's something you can do at a startup.
You might have noticed that even Google, which was pretty much the company with perpetuals "betas" that tossed more
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Large corporations are usually not very innovative.
Often true. But Apple seems to be an exception. This may be one legacy of Steve Jobs. A willingness to take time to perfect things, to relentlessly improve their offerings without getting distracted trying to clone the current-big-thing, to bet the company on an opportunity, and to aggressively steer a large company faster than would be possible without a BDL [wikipedia.org] as CEO.
Perhaps the need for time and space to perfect their products is the origin of Apple's notorious secrecy.
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Not really. I work for a large company in software development. Our product is innovative, but we're forced to use silly old paradigms. Fully SQL database driven. Everything has to be .NET. LINQ is not allowed.
Now, the problem isn't the company, but the managers. They don't understand that LINQ isn't Entity Framework ("LINQ we don't allow because we can't tune DB queries"). Also: we use Visual Studio 2008. Because "old tech is proven and reliable". That is what my boss and his superiors actually believe.
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Pokémon Go is the best social space for thugs since Craigslist.
Popular for the moment (Score:3, Insightful)
IMHO (which is biased) Pokemon has a limited lifespan, until people actually get bored doing the same old shit every day. There is almost nothing compelling about the game, and there is very little if any competition between the teams.
So, while it may be exciting now, because it is shiny and new, once the luster tarnishes, what is there to hold the attention of Dory the Fish?
Re:Popular for the moment (Score:5, Interesting)
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Updates may keep it alive. If there is a reward for exploring new places, you can bet people will take out the game to see new stuff when they travel to new places. Currently though, the landmarks can be reused every 5 minutes. The game has a ton of "borrowed" content, it just has to capitalize on it.
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So what about their previous game, Ingress? That seems to still be going strong.
So yes, content updates are key, but there's so much content available AND all the experience in Ingress that could be applied to
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They might even make a movie about it...!
Re:Popular for the moment (Score:5, Insightful)
"Pokemon has a limited lifespan" Pretty bold statement about a gaming franchise going as strong as ever 20 years later down the road from where it started. Not bad for a property that is older than the entirety of the XBox existing, and almost as old as the original PlayStation, just to put things into perspective. But yes, let's keep on claiming it has a "limited lifespan"
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Of course it has limited lifespan, but: how limited? Did you miss the part about more people using it than Facebook? I thought Facebook's novelty would wear off after a few weeks, but people are still playing that too! Or at least they were, until a week ago...
If Pokemon Go is the new Facebook whose bandwagon all our bosses want us to jump onto (our site doesn't have to have a like button anymore? Instead we have to tell people to look around for critters?) that's a refreshing change. Now where's my Pokem
Re:Popular for the moment (Score:5, Interesting)
Add in PvP and it will get even bigger. Trading is coming which will be a huge incentive, but the ability to have pokemon battles against your friends will turn this into something more addictive than crack.
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PvP will be introduced very cautiously. There's a super-child-friendly brand to protect, and a mixed-age audience. When 14-year-old player goes out to battle and meets up with 42-year-old player, even with purely innocent intent, the creep-factor will be off the charts.
Re:Popular for the moment (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really sure how this is different to trading? I doubt you would be able to ever stand there with a beacon on saying battle me, or trade with me. I had assumed that trading would be restricted to people who knew that each other were playing and the same with PvP. Of course that allows organisations outside of Pokemon Go to organise battles but again no different to trading.
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While I'm not a big pokemon person, the series and games both came out when I was in high school/college so I missed the original 'craze', I decided to take a look by installing it on my tablet... Only to be told my tablet wasn't supported. So while I've seen pics and gone 'eh', I can't actually see for myself. I'm even less motivated to take a peek now.
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Btw what I find even funnier is Nintendo just send me an email ad stating 'Nintendo is the place to be for summer!' and not once did they even hint to the seeming popularity of Pokemon Go... Or even recognize it's existence. It reminds me how disconnected they really seem from their 'fans'.
This app is begging for wearable tech (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if it could have been the killer app for google glass... if people hadn't been so freaked out about privacy that they would assault anyone wearing one.
Re:This app is begging for wearable tech (Score:4, Interesting)
Google glass failed because it was rubbish. Horrible interface, slow and a really crap screen. Not to mention ugly and weird looking.
Privacy was a concern but I feel like that was more of a US centric concern than a general world wide one.
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So, your solution to people hating Google Glass because it could have its camera on all the time, is to write an app that requires its camera to be on all the time?
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Well, Pokemon Go is a game that you can tell doesn't feed information back to a company famous for invading privacy and building giant databases on people. I mean, it's camera data remains locally there (known) and not based on what app they are running. So, not as likely to record people.
Secondly, holding a phone in your hand is a conscious action. Most people aren't worried about obvious, human limited recording. It's the passive, pervasive police state glassholes wanted to subject us to that people o
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I presume then that you would be against any kind of general purpose computing platform as wearable tech that could provide an immersive augmented reality system, because it also contains a camera (which is necessary to provide an augmented reality that seamlessly blends with the physical surroundings) that could also conceivably be used to record people's activities, and would not require any sort of "conscious action" like holding something in your hand to utilize. Consider that the fact that it wouldn
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Yes, I tend to oppose any "general purpose computing platform as wearable tech that could provide an immersive augmented reality system". I'd be fine with such wearables if there were safeguards that prevented the camera images from being uploaded to a server, say by having the AR done at the OS level.
I don't want license plate trackers, for faces, following me around - that seems logical.
Make your wearable a watch! Make it a cameraless screen in front of your eyes. Those don't impose a cost on my privac
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Do I think that there are people tracking me? No. Do I think that computer systems are tracking me on par with everyone else. Yes. Do I therefore oppose increasing their power? Yes.
I mean, do you not think that license plate tracking cameras are recording your car's movements along with all others?
Wetware is totally different. There's a fundamental difference in scale, completeness, and data-minability of automated metrics. Human beings have finiite time, and I doubt they want to spend time on me.
It'
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Yeah because people continuously fed videos and pictures at a constant rate to the mothership on their limited data plans.
Personally I don't see the problem with Google Glass. I do however instantly form an opinion of people who use the word Glasshole about a person they've never met and don't know.
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Absent that constant feed, half or more of the AR features don't work. I mean, if you want it to pop up info on who you are talking to, you need to send a picture of their face. Or if you want to find out about cheaper online deals, you need to send the barcode. IN both cases, you can do a lot of preprocessing on teh device.
In fairness, I don't think I ever met a murderer, but I still form an opinion about them. Judging someone based on their actions, esp. when that judgement is condemning them for a spe
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What if ... (Score:5, Funny)
And then slice virtual fruits using virtual knives to feed the angry birds?
What if the angry birds eating sliced fruits become candy that you must crush?
Inquiring minds want to know...
I see bums on the street... (Score:2)
...slashing out at virtual fruit and ranting about green pigs. They were playing some game called MD2020
Data gathering? (Score:2)
.
http://www.infowars.com/pokemo... [infowars.com]
Pokémon Go Linked to CIA Augmented reality software could turn smartphones into Imperial probe droids
The ‘augmented reality’ mobile game Pokémon Go, which uses the player’s smartphone camera to ‘add’ Pokémon to real-world locations, has ties to the CIA. The developer of Pokémon Go, Niantic, Inc., was founded by John Hanke, who previously received funding from the CIA’s venture capital firm In-Q-Tel to develop what eventually became Google Earth.
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You should read Charles Stross' "Halting State". Forget data gathering, AR apps can be used to get people to do useful tasks for you, for free! Need someone to scope out a target of interest? Make it an objective in the game for them to take a picture of the area. Need someone to deliver a message or carry information discreetly? Make it part of the game, and give them points when the message is successfully dropped off.
Controlling a popular AR game would allow you to create mobs on demand. This is limited
Lessons from Ingress (Score:5, Insightful)
It'll grow past the game it is and some people will figure out that they enjoy the indirect aspects of the game. Fitness groups, history study groups, faction gatherings, strategy planning groups. Ingress went from a game on the screen to people actually meeting and doing other stuff.
Tonight... (Score:2)
Impressive (Score:5, Insightful)
All the more impressive considering that it's a shit Pokemon game. It's a decent Engress mod, sure, but as a Pokemon game, it's terrible
There are almost no battles. The few that exist are limited to mashing your screen, instead of the turn-based strategy usually associated with Pokemon.
And those scant few battles do not grant experience to your critters. The only way to level them up is to capture a couple dozen of the same 'mon, and grind them into kibble ("candies"). You'll get a couple dozen levels from each candy (current peak levels in the 1000-1500 range). Evolving takes between 15-400 candies. Oh, and the candies are breed specific.
These come to a hilarious point regarding your starter Pokemon. Normally, you pick one of 3 or 4 Pokemon to start your game, and that critter can level with you the whole game long. You'll give them a unique name, see them evolve and mature. You still pick a starter here, but none of that emotional attachment here. Your starter will be universally ground into the aforementioned kibble and fed to a higher level version of itself caught in the wild.
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yeah what a terrible game 21 million people playing it every day having an awesome time
here, have zero fucks to add to your gigantic pile
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I never said it was a bad game.
Quite the opposite, I said it's a good Ingress mod. Ingress is already a popular title, so a good mod to a good game is ... good
That said, it's a terrible Pokemon game, with only superficial nods to the series. You can like the game all you want, it can be popular as pie, but it betrays the title.
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Hang on, the way to make your monster more powerful is murder its brothers and feed it their entrails, which totally doesn't just give it a prion disease? Then you can force it to fight in mortal combat?
Cartoon drawings aside, this sounds like a pretty horrific game.
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Yup ... this also makes rare critters basically worthless.
More of the same species = more kibble to level up others of that species. Rare Pokemon are, well, rare... giving you less kibble with which to upgrade.
Yawn (Score:2)
I've seen a lot of MMO launches. Tell me the numbers in 6 months.
What If.. . (Score:2)
Re:Waze (Score:1)
There's an app for that.
Non-Death of Nintendo continues to baffle experts (Score:2)
Every generation of consoles cause streams of claims the sky has finally fallen in on Nintendo. Sega's (and Turbographics)CD based systems were the initial perceived killer. After that the N64 (still cartridge based) was not powerful enough to compete. Then the Gamecube was again not powerful enough to play the games people wanted to buy. Then the Wii was just the cube put into a new box with fancy shake equipped controllers. At every stage Nintendo causes a rip to form in the 'power is everything' argument
slither (Score:2)
irrelevant as fuck.
The game is great in a browser (but cpu heavy and not using multiple cores), but sucks on mobile devices. Just like agar its controls are made for a mouse, not a touch screen.
If you want a game, which actually works better on a touch screen install osmos. Looks like agar, has a similiar objective (in some types of levels) but the controls work with tapping behind instead of moving the mouse point in the direction you want to go. So they are great on tablets or even phones.
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> NSA or some other intelligence agency, to trick people
"Sir, we've found that there's clusters of pokemon players at the dratini spawns. What could this mean?"
"We're aware soldier. Word from the top is that they'll have fully evolved dragonites within a week."
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What is that you think they're going to gleam from that data given that they had the ingress data for the past three years?
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I don't see much use for this data, because people are being actually guided by the application, rather than acting on their own.
You have to remember that in the end of the day, what google wants with the data is to sell it to the companies as statistics and bullshit like "yes, getting a red logo made more people pay attention to your product".
Of course, a more likely scenario would be to place a pokemon close to a product you want to sell, but its arguable if the person will even see the product.
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Compared to Cameron this can only be an improvement. Then again, the average water cooler would be.
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You say people wandering off cliffs 'cause they're too stupid to survive as if that was a bad thing.
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Believe it or not, most people have emotional responses like "compassion" and "empathy".
Before you respond with some pro-eugenics screed, consider that people who lack the above traits would be among those on the chopping block...
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Oh, i pity them, all right. Just not regret them.
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Historically speaking, people without compassion and empathy tend to hide their crap well and tend to be much more guarded against typical human scheming and unpredictability thus increasing their survival ratings,
while people with compassion and empathy tend to be the first idiots to fall because with those two traits comes a giant jump in naivety and self-destructive trustworthiness whereby they get used as tools or sacrificial pawns easily.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but someone had to. If there's one th
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I am sorry, but I can't feel compassion for people who walk into their own grave because they're too stupid to take a look first. It might surprise you, though, that I am VERY readily willing to offer any help to people who got into a difficult situation without any fault of their own. Not going into private details here, but that can go to lengths others wouldn't even consider.
But no regret, no compassion, no empathy for people too stupid to survive. Ever.
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But no regret, no compassion, no empathy for people too stupid to survive. Ever.
People like children and those with intellectual disabilities...
Oh, not those people, right? You surely have compassion and empathy for them. Where do you draw the line? What sort of person do you actually have in mind? Who isn't worthy of the same consideration you so generously offer to others?
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Neither children nor disabled people chose their condition. Try again.
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Keep moving that goal post. You stated, quite clearly:
But no regret, no compassion, no empathy for people too stupid to survive. Ever.
Can you choose to be "too stupid to survive"? That's incoherent. Obviously, being "too stupid to survive" is beyond the control of those "too stupid to survive".
Or do you mean "I have no compassion or empathy for people of otherwise normal intelligence who take unnecessary risks"? Well, that makes it easy for you to feel superior to anyone for any reason. (Let's face it, this is all about you feeling superior to an entire class of people.) I don't kn
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You're very good at selective quoting and quotemining. Picking the part about idiocy and leaving out the part where I talk about this not applying to people who are in a disadvantaged position due to no error on their side.
Be it as it may, since nobody really gives a fuck anymore and nobody but the two of us are reading this anymore, and you have made up your mind about me, this is basically as much time as I'm willing to invest here.
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I think my point is made. You are incapable of answering the only question I've asked you: how you determine who is and is not a recipient of your compassion and empathy.
The answer, obviously, is that you can not. Not without making a deeply uncomfortable ethical compromise. That is, you can not stand by your claim that you have "no regret, no compassion, no empathy for people too stupid to survive. Ever."
I don't care if you just want to "win" a silly argument on the internet and won't admit it here, as
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since when is that a bad thing?
i'm all for anything that pulls people away from facebook, even if it means every so often one wanders off a cliff looking for a pokemon.
Arizona reporting in: just lost another one...
http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/1... [cnn.com]
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Comparing it to Miitomo is a fucking joke. That was some interactive social experiment crap. This is goddamned pokemon.
If Nintendo wanted to make apps, they would need to use one of their actual franchises. That doesn't mean they have to make Mobile Mario (though they could!), or ANY *existing* franchise (though they should!). But it does mean that they need fantasy characters in a fantasy world, not more stupid Mii bullshit.
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> Nobody on /. cares about Pokemon.
Oh get real, this game is huge.