Pokemon Go Doubles Nintendo's Stock Price (reuters.com) 108
An anonymous reader quotes a report form Reuters: Shares of Japan's Nintendo Co soared another 14 percent on Tuesday, more than doubling the firm's market capitalization to 4.5 trillion yen ($42.5 billion) in just seven sessions since the mobile game Pokemon GO was launched in the United States. The phenomenal success of Pokemon GO -- now available in 35 countries, the majority in Europe, and most recently in Canada -- has triggered massive buying in Nintendo shares, surprising even some seasoned market players. Nintendo shares ended Tuesday up 14.4 percent at 31,770 yen, bringing its gains to more than 100 percent since the launch of the game on July 6. Turnover in Nintendo shares hit 703.6 billion yen, surpassing the record for trading turnover in individual shares it set on Friday, of 476 billion yen. Trading in Nintendo shares roughly accounted for a quarter of the entire trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange's main board. The success of Pokemon GO, unforeseen even by its creators, has boosted hopes that Nintendo could capitalize on a line-up of popular characters ranging from Zelda to Super Mario to strengthen its new foray into augmented reality. Pokemon GO is now the biggest mobile game of all time in the United States.
Let's play... (Score:5, Funny)
... Bubble Bobble!
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need a live top down shot like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re:Let's play... (Score:4, Funny)
later lets play global thermonuclearwar
Re:Let's play... (Score:4, Funny)
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
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Alas, there seem to be no stock options available for Nintendo. Nor is it possible (thru Thinkorswim, at least) to sell short. Lame.....
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Too similar? Really the only difference is that when you entrap a monster in a sphere, you enslave it in Pokemon, while in Bubble Bobble, you simply kill it. Seems like a shoddy knock off too me.
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Bubble Bobble is one of the included games in the Mini-NES [polygon.com] coming out later this year.
Otherwise, the Bubble Bobble Revolution game for DS also contains a copy of the original NES game. I just played that through and avoided the Revolution game altogether.
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...
Have you not gone outside in the past week? Seriously?
Re:And yet nothing of value was gained. (Score:5, Insightful)
Purely anecdotal, but from what I've seen it's people aged 4 to 40+.
And a fuck load of them at that. Also it's good to see groups of kids out and about walking and riding places rather than just loitering around with "nothing to do".
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It seems the same to me. Before they loitered about with their eyes glued to their phone screens. Today they're loitering about with their eyes glued to their phone screen. Granted, at pokestops it's usually much more loiterers, but they all are still glued to their phone screens, like a bunch of zombies.
Reminds me of the cartoons where everyone
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," said tlhIngan, staring like a zombie at their terminal mindlessly typing slashdot comments like a SHEEPLE
Re:And yet nothing of value was gained. (Score:4, Insightful)
When I play Pokemon Go, I am looking around at the world. Because my phone vibrates when a Pokemon is in range, so I don't need to stare at it continuously.
Re:And yet nothing of value was gained. (Score:5, Insightful)
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52 here and very much in agreement. I bet there's plenty older too.
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1. It's summer
2. It's social
3. It's Pokemon
It's a geolocation MMO built with an extremely popular franchise on top of it. The game is based on Ingress, which had something like 7 million players as of last year and even then a lot of people hadn't even hard of Niantic before Pokemon Go. Most of the important locations were generated from Ingress and/or data collected from Ingress players.
I don't think that either Nintendo or Niantic were quite prepared for the rush that is happening right now, I mean they k
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Seriously, who plays that game and why?
I went to a nearby closed food store and meet three male kids walking with their phones up talking about where they should go. ... maybe they were just taking a stroll and had to discuss where they should go next and held their phones like all kids do .. or they played the game.
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Many people, and none of them owe you an explanation.
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Unforseen? (Score:2, Interesting)
I still can't figure out why people are so dense when it comes to the potential of augmented reality.
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What is the potential of AR?
Because, to be honest, I can't really see it.
You can project shit over your car windscreen. Or you could just have a pane of glass and have all the shit you need to look at slightly below it. Thus, you can see all the road AND all the instruments. Why do you want or need one obscuring the other?
I think the same of AR. I can point my phone at the Eiffel Tower and see... what? The Eiffel tower behind lots of shit that I may or may not want, that I could still read if I just pr
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Augmented reality and market capitalization are the same thing. We got another unicorn here..
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Augmented capitalization, perhaps?
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I mean, it depends on what's on the screen of the headset. But in general, you are correct. More importantly, they are completely different. VR will have use in gaming, experience-based scenarios, and design. AR will have applications in daily life, and possibly in industry.
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What is the potential of AR?
I agree that the cases you listed are not too exciting. The one case that I have seen that is pretty exciting and useful is text translation. Nokia has (had?) a pretty slick translation application where you could point your phone at some text and it would translate it on the fly, in place. Works great when pointing it at a menu or something where you want to see the translation alongside pictures and other positionally useful information. It would translate and overlay the translations it could do, and lef
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Nokia has (had?) a pretty slick translation application where you could point your phone at some text and it would translate it on the fly
Google Translate does this now.
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Alright, you're the current leader on this thread. All the rest are tripe and nonsense (identify poisonous snakes, my arse).
I've used Google Translate to do exactly this for my Italian girlfriend and her family. Shall I tell you the problem, however? The translation still sucks.
And making it same colour and "augmenting" it into the picture of the menu is nowhere near as useful as just translating it. Honestly, the movement and positioning and losing the translation just as you slide the device over to t
Re:Unforseen? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, I'll bite.
What about indicating in a super market what are the objects that you want and which are the ones that you don't. That information could come from a master list of what you want to cook this week and what is currently on sales.
This similarly applies to clothing stores: your niece would love that dress and her birthday is in two weeks.
Or in book stores, you could pick up the book and have typical reviews show up around it.
In games, the alien demo from MS hololens was awesome. A colleague of mine has one of the dev kits, and the game was fun and exciting. If it is cheap, I'd buy one.
Once again for board games, like warhammer 40k, you could use VR to make the actual rules of the game using a computer and keep track of the status of a unit, show movement, ...
There is potential in virtual art. I think there was a book of gibson (doctorow?) that integrated the concepts. Though it is somewhat similar to pokemon go.
You could do interesting things in recalling tracking from the past. Maybe you have a room with cameras that constructed a 3d model of the room over time, and you could roll back what happened in the room while being in the room. Gives you a different perspective on event. Could be useful for law enforcement for instance.
I see lots of potential applications of VR. now, holding the phone in front of you has definite drawbacks, but a hololens like device could apply to many things.
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What about indicating in a super market what are the objects that you want and which are the ones that you don't.
How about providing product information for supermarket items in AR rather than sifting through mountains of labels which all have a tiny logo followed by most of the packaging describing daily intakes, salts, sugars, chemicals, GMO warnings, recycling information, alcohol content, allergen content, halal certification, ... I'm sure I've left some out.
In related news I picked up a packet of peanut brittle which on the front had a warning that it contained peanuts as if the title wasn't warning enough. We ca
This is our future! (Score:3)
http://vimeo.com/166807261 [vimeo.com] :O
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I think the same of AR. I can point my phone at the Eiffel Tower and see... what? The Eiffel tower behind lots of shit that I may or may not want, that I could still read if I just pressed the button and held the phone facing down like a normal person reading stuff.
You didn't have to search for "eiffel tower". If there are geograhically relevant markers, they are contextual to your orientation to the object. Think about a typical indoor map. Instead of finding the "you are here" marker and trying to figure out which way you are looking, AR can project an arrow pointing you to where you want to go.
What does AR give you over anything else? So far the biggest usage is imprinting "hidden" cartoon characters over your high-res image of the thing ACTUALLY IN FRONT OF YOU.
Yes, sort of like if you were looking at a sign in front of the Eiffel tower, it would imprint a high res sign over the Eiffel tower. The idea isn't to stare into your AR gog
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When done correctly it is very useful, it's just hard to do it correctly. Pokemon GO is not actually using augmented reality. It just calls what it is doing augmented reality, but really it is just super imposing cartoon characters on top of video from your phone's camera. There is a but of integration with your phone's accelerometers, but this is pointless, and most people just turn it off.
Augmented reality when it is done correctly will become an essential piece of technology. Imagine walking around w
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Really? I see massive possibilities and the only limiting factor is the form factor of the device at the moment. If you could imbed the AR into a set of normal looking glasses it becomes huge.
Ignore for a second the privacy issues and the creep factor and just think on whether these things would be useful or not. Names of people floating over their heads, bread crumb navigation dots, interactive points for information when visiting places, being able to pin reminder points.
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The AR component of Pokemon Go isn't really a key feature. It doesn't even work on phones that don't have a hardware gyroscope, and that means a majority of the Android phones. It's actually easier to 'catch' a pokemon with the AR feature disabled, and many people play the game that way.
The key features of Pokemon Go is the GPS, that objectives are hard physical locations in the real world, and that logging kilometers of walking is one of the objectives in gameplay.
The AR part is, kinda, just a shiney bit
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You can project shit over your car windscreen. Or you could just have a pane of glass and have all the shit you need to look at slightly below it. Thus, you can see all the road AND all the instruments. Why do you want or need one obscuring the other?
Because if it is done correctly, the instrument panel readings and GPS directions aren't obscuring the road. I can ignore them when I don't care about them, and glance at them much more quickly when I do care about them.
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Laser tag + augmented reality + first person shooter. You think old farts get annoyed by Pokemon, just wait.
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What is the potential of AR?
Because, to be honest, I can't really see it.
Just wait for Virtual Girlfriend 1.0
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I'm honestly struggling for what information you'd want to overlay over reality that you can't get quicker, easier and less obtrusively by just holding the same device in your hand and looking at it.
Wow, then you REALLY need to get a bit more imaginative. Big hint: don't just think of basic GPS, think about all possible sensory inputs to drive the AR data.
Here's a scary but entirely possible scenario in the near future: you hold up your phone and use the camera to scan the room. It automatically recognizes everyone you point at via facial recognition (Facebook already has something like 500M+ people's faces that it can use, and growing). That will tell you at *minimum* their name (which is highly us
At least here Pokemon GO gets free advertising (Score:4, Insightful)
After the US launch there was a constant trickle of news articles about Pokemon GO. Since it was released a week a go that trickle became a huge wave. Every day there are new articles about people playing - mostly positive nostalgic pieces. This publicity is something that money just cannot buy.
Meanwhile the game is so overloaded that my daugher cannot get it to work on her phone. The whole thing is just crazy.
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The game has succeeded not only in bringing augmented reality to the public's attention, but at inverting the whole concept. It's turned players (walking around staring at their phones) into real advertisements for a virtual game - kind of an augmented virtuality.
I want to say I knew this would happen (Score:2)
Fuck that, buy CAPCOM shares (Score:2)
Two words: Street Fighter GO!
Can you say Hadouken?
Let get Cannon Fodder going (Score:1)
should clean up the streets pretty fast.
pokemon NO (Score:1)
n/t
Obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's been pretty obvious to me that Nintendo's value is in it's IP, not it's hardware. Games on other systems, movies, tv etc. are where the growth is.
It has been suggested before:
25 Jan 2007: http://www.cnet.com/forums/dis... [cnet.com]
28 April 2012: http://www.slashgear.com/why-n... [slashgear.com]
20 Aug 2013: http://www.ign.com/boards/thre... [ign.com]
2 years ago: http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards... [gamefaqs.com]
7 Oct 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
21 Nov 2014: http://www.polygon.com/2014/11... [polygon.com]
http://www.thetoptens.com/reas... [thetoptens.com]
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I am not sure I agree the value is in the IP. You could argue SEGA, for a while, by copying the times trends during the age of the Megadrive and its succesors, had many strong IPs.
It turns out IPs are worth almost nothing by themselves. They need to be backed by released, commercials, and SOME SUCCESS. The latter is the hardest.
So what do I mean by this? Well, during the early 90s, Nintendo did license out some of their IPs over low threshold. The results is things like CD-i Zelda(3 shit games), Mario Teach
Hardware (Score:1)
They can still do hardware, but I'd suggest addons to other systems rather than a whole console line. Perhaps custom controllers, or if they're going to hook up with more VR games, a decent VR system consoles (although a Nintento AR system would be cool), an addon for smart devices, or a VR "ds"
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Business buying lures, I think are the biggest monetization option.
plot to brainwash kids into attacking pearl harbor (Score:1)
Just wait for them to have an pokemon camp where it's really a place to pump out brainwashed child soldiers.
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For the swarm!
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Of All The Useless Things You Could Do (Score:1)
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Oh, I see. Perfectly understandable now, sir... you're a raving asshole who thinks that being out in the open is an invite to get children raped.
I seriously hope someone snips off your balls before you every have children. I'd hate to see you passing this kind of bullshit on to another generation.
Now go fuck yourself, bitch ass fucktard.
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I don't know. A webforum post bitching about the game might be even more useless...
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Yep. It's definitely a good way to detect idiots... by finding all of the posts like yours from people who rage against a simple phone game.
People love to spend their time on all kinds of inane stuff... no reason to get so upset over it.
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Hey! Get back to curing cancer.
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I found it to be a nice change of pace to my usual walk.
Walked about 27km today instead of the usual 4.
Sure the new car smell will wear off in about a week and then I probably will only fire it up once or twice per month.
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I welcome it (Score:1)
Hopefulls it helps them recover from the low Wii U sales and enables them to provide many more enthralling games in the future.
But remember... (Score:2)
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... Nintendo is in danger of dying! /sarcasm
Netcraft has confirmed it ;^)
Just google "Netcraft has confirmed: Nintendo is dying." if it is on the internet it must be true...
12 years ago...on slashdot the PokemonGo ancestor (Score:3, Interesting)
https://games.slashdot.org/story/04/04/02/0113231/mogi-location-based-mobile-gaming-hits-japan
I was part of that company. Talk about being too early...data charges for playing were ranging in the hundreds of dollars for the most active players.
http://links.net/share/write/thefeature/Mogi__Second_Generation_Location-Based_Gaming.html
Banana Software (Score:2)
I tried it, and I'm wondering what the hype is about. Not because of the idea, which is nice, but the implementation, which totally sucks. Very regular and very annoying crashes that waste items, severe server problems, burning through the battery as if it was calculating PI to a gazillion digits (this app is the only one to make my phone *hot*!), etc.
For some in-game advances (hatching pokemon-eggs) you have to walk certain distances. Ok, I know my regular morning walk distance, which is 2.4km. I had to re
Outdoor computer gaming is coming (Score:1)
The whole share market is in a massive upswing (Score:1)
Star Trek predicted this (Score:1)