Pokemon Go Daily Active Users, Downloads, Engagement Are Dropping (bloomberg.com) 194
An anonymous reader writes:Pokemon Go is starting to lose the battle for mobile mindshare, according to Axiom Capital Management. As such, investors and executives at Facebook Inc., Instagram, Tinder (Match Group Inc.), Twitter Inc., and Snapchat can breathe a sigh of relief, says Senior Analyst Victor Anthony. "Given the rapid rise in usage of the Pokemon Go app since the launch in July, investors have been concerned that this new user experience has been detracting from time spent on other mobile focused apps," he writes.
Enthusiasm about the potential for Pokemon Go (and augmented reality gaming in general) to improve Nintendo Co Ltd.'s financial performance sent shares parabolic after the app launched in the U.S., and even spurred rallies in secondary plays linked to the success of the game. Data from Sensor Tower, SurveyMonkey, and Apptopia, however, show that Pokemon Go's daily active users, downloads, engagement, and time spent on the app per day are all well off their peaks and on a downward trend.
You wouldn't know it was declining here.... (Score:3)
Geez, the other night, driving through City Park about 3:30am on a Friday night, the place was packed with people slowly cruising around in cars with their Pokemon playing on their phones.
It wasn't just there...at major sites all over town all last weekend, I saw a surprisingly LARGE amount of people out all times of day and especially late night playing it...
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It wasn't just there...at major sites all over town all last weekend, I saw a surprisingly LARGE amount of people out all times of day and especially late night playing it...
Am I the only one who's reminded of the ST:TNG episode about Riker finding the head-mounted video game on Risa and the whole crew of the Enterprise becoming addicted to it?
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Shut up, Wesley!
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High abundance of water pokemon?
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Absolutely!!! TONS of them, especially if near Lake Pontchartrain....
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At little harder to find, but I have in City Park, and out in Kenner near the Treasure Chest casino....that whole area is LOADED with stuff.
And people.
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You'd not know it was not he decline here in New Orleans. Geez, the other night, driving through City Park about 3:30am on a Friday night, the place was packed with people slowly cruising around in cars with their Pokemon playing on their phones.
That wasn't Pokemon. That was Grindr.
Take note pointy hair bosses (Score:5, Insightful)
Niantic has no one to blame but themselves on this one. First, instead of assuring there was server stability for North America they kept rolling out to new areas resulting in server crashes. During this time anyone that was using lures or eggs or other items were quite livid over the loss of an item they paid for due to the server(s) being down.
Then came the three-step bug. When it went away, no longer could the average Joe Sixpack juts walk around and find new pokemon. It was an effort in futility made only https://games.slashdot.org/story/16/08/23/1437229/pokemon-go-daily-active-users-downloads-engagement-are-dropping#worse by the choice to ban 3rd party services that would facilitate in showing where the Pokemon were. And then to top it all off was the cheating. I can't take a gym if the Gym-Leader is a bunch of 35 level bots with great pokemon.
So at a competitive disadvantage, with no real end goal but walking around collecting pidgeys the game was a bust.
Good try, better luck next time pointy haired managers
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Honestly, as an Ingress player, the first couple I don't mind; those can be solved by adding more servers and issuing credits/refunds. It's the botting/cheating that irritates the fuck out of me. I get it, for a few people, *that* is the game. But for those of us who actually play, it's really a hot button issue. We have the same spoofing/botting in Ingress, but fortunately the game is relatively small and those guys end up getting caught and even ratted on (if they play IRL) by their teamates because w
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I wonder if anyone has worked out spoofing GPS to cheat. I presume that the game uses the phones GPS chip to decide where you are anyways.
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http://hackaday.com/2016/07/19... [hackaday.com]
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yes, this is exactly the sort of cheating I'm referring to. It's also how the bots work, by spoofing their gps coordinates and slowly (if they don' want to get caught) update position as if they're walking/biking. Kinda suspicious when you're in LAX at 3:50PM and taking down a portal in North Dakota at 3:55PM. Either that or you're sitting on the secrets behind teleportation.
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True, but the problem was that lot's of people was playing the game outside of North America, even before it was released outside North America. So the longer they waited with world release, the larger the difference in level/skill would be between players who know how to sideload the app, and those who did not and thus had to wait for the official release.
But they still scaled better then twitter(Look at the issues twitter has had with scaling, and Nianic had to scale from 9M users, to larger then twitter
In many places, (Score:5, Funny)
School started.
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Why is this rated "Funny" -- it's probably the #1 cause...
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Because most universities are just a billion pokestops on top of each other, you'd think it would increase when people went back to school. Anecdotally it seems like a lot of people are picking it up more whne they get to campus.
And, being in school involvs a lot of waiting around, walking, etc.
Matches my observations (Score:5, Funny)
Over the last couple of months, when I cut through one of the local parks on its bike trail, it's looked like the Night of the Living Dead: A bunch of zombies obliviously wandering around, staring down into their phones and cluelessly blocking the path.
Lately, the zombie outbreak seems to have abated somewhat, and the bike path isn't so much of an obstacle course.
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We're having such a good time...
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Consider yourself lucky. I live in the Netherlands and the zombies were on their bikes cycling down the bike trail.
Just like your experience except with more momentum and more pain when it goes wrong.
They've been scrambling not improving (Score:5, Insightful)
The game launched with a very small set of game play mechanics. Since launch, they've removed 1 mechanic (tracking pokemon) and have added nothing .
If they were capable of keeping their launch-day mechanics in place and weren't scrambling to just keep the servers alive (the reason they removed the mechanic they did) then they could have focused their small development team on improving the game instead.
The key mechanics in the old pokemon games was battling friends & AI and trading pokemon. If they added those mechanics into Pokemon go, then they might be able to keep the interest going a bit longer.
Until then, it's collecting things that you can't find. The fun in that wears thin pretty quickly.
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That's obvious by the time it took them to fix the tracking system an the load balancing of the servers. The game was also released feature incomplete ( no fighting, no trading, and on version 0.2*)
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The game release was rushed, pressured by Nintendo, because they wanted POGO to hipe
I'm sure the start of summer school holidays for more than half of the target audience had nothing to do with the launch date.
This is normal for mobile games (Score:5, Insightful)
It was a smartphone fad (Score:2)
Maybe they caught them all? (Score:2)
Still most downloaded app (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok, so you have a really popular app come out. Lots of people try it and like it. Then lots more try it because lots of other people are. This second group doesn't see what is appealing and chucks it. This still doesn't detract from it being popular, or indicate it is doomed.
E.g. Look at World of Warcraft, now has 1/2 the subscribers it did at its peak a few years ago. Despite this it is still going strong as the most popular MMO.
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Several million subscribers, at 13-16 bucks (depending on your subscription plan) /month...
Do the math, it's still a license to print money....
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WoW has many things Pokemon Go doesn't. If it doesn't change I would predict it is doomed as it follows the same pattern and game design of other games that were doomed:
1. No strategy or thought required to play.
2. No skill required and skills don't get improved. Throw a ball at a thing.
3. Variance is based exclusively on levels and type of pokemon.
4. The entire mechanic of the game relies on time and collection of the same resource (balls) to keep playing.
5. There's no end goal, no challenge, no real PvP.
U
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1. It interacts with real life. If you want to hit those poke stops and gyms you have to plan your route.
2. Throwing a ball correctly requires some skill, which will increase your chance of capture and get more exp.
3. Nope, individual pokemon in the same species can differ on their stats, even at max level.
4. This isn't bad (and slightly wrong, as there are things like eggs, lures, potions, ect...)
5. Your major end-game challenge is trying to hold on to as many gyms as possible.
In any case, there is enough
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It's impossible to hold gyms for more than a few hours, and even if you did, there is no point to.
Actually there is. You know the currency you have to pay real money to get? Apparently you get it if you can hold on to a gym for more than 20 hours. I've never been in a place where gym churn is slow enough for that to happen, so I can't verify it.
But that's why the bot-swarms bother with gyms - to farm those "coins" from them.
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Well... yeah (Score:2)
Is this a surprise? This is probably exactly what the companies behind the game knew was going to happen.
In other news, fewer people will go and watch Suicide Squad this weekend compared to last.
Analysts discover hypetrains, news at 11 (Score:2)
It's because the game has no long term goals (Score:4, Insightful)
Essentially, Pokemon Go has little to offer once the novelty wears off.
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>Unlike Ingress, where there is a continuing story line influenced by how well the two factions are doing,
Doesn't this just make it unlikely for people to want to play Ingress?
I get the point of Ingress, but it seems extremely pointless.
Go really doesn't have anything going for it either, but it has 1 core goal: To catch them all. Thats your long term goal. Everything else is a part of the fun journey.
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Doesn't this just make it unlikely for people to want to play Ingress?
Not really; I've been playing for several months now and I've noticed that 95% of the players don't really care about the storyline. It's all buried on various websites with DAYS worth of video and media, so most new players don't take the time to read the backstory - and I've never been able to find a "cliffs notes" version.
But things DO get interesting when the outcome of anomalies (big, meetup style competitive events that are held all over the world) affects gameplay dynamics. The Enlightenment (one o
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My commute to and from work along the embarcadero in san francisco is loaded with the requisite magikarp. I go into the office a couple times a week, and had determined that I can collect enough over the course of a few weeks. That will beat my brother-in-law, but it is pretty disheartening to overhear groups of people discussing how they are evolving a gyarados a day over there.
it's pretty clear that there's
Great idea... (Score:2)
Great idea, terrible execution.
No surprise that it started off super popular. Who wouldn't want to relive their childhood Pokemon days, except in the real world? And it is indeed really fun at first. The thrill of catching new Pokemon is a great high.
But then reality sets in:
Rampant Engagement Problems (Score:2, Informative)
After my experience with Pokémon Go (and subsequent reduction in playtime), here are the issues as I see them:
- Too many pop-up messages now preventing gameplay or interfering with it. It's not the game's job to police my actions.
- Acquisition of Poké Balls is too difficult, even in urban areas, given that as you level up the Pokémon run away more and are more difficult to catch.
- Fighting at gyms is just a terrible and unreliable experience. The entire battle system needs an overhaul and sho
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Pokemon Gone! (Score:2)
Bye, Pokemon!
It's time now. (Score:2)
Has it really? (Score:2)
Pokemon Go has been cracking down on the bot accounts lately. Are we just seeing how much of this traffic was generated by these automated accounts vs. actual people?
It still has its playability (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not a game for the "power gamers" who want to level up, get gear, level up, get gear..and win. And I think they are finding that out, they can powergame themselves to have very high CP pokemon and rule gyms but then someone who took 4 times as long to level up and get their pokemon comes up and drops them. It's almost very anti-power gamer..haha!
They used cheating to get themselves all the best pokemon that they needed, and now they "fixed" the cheats and they cry that its boring? haha
This is still a very fun casual game that you can play with your family.
There is something unique to this game in that it solves something that the gaming industry has so far failed to do: encourage exercise and real social interactions. I mean actually interacting with real people, not trolls hidden behind their keyboard with large epeens.
It encourages you to go on walks, travel, actually interact with the outside world. That's been the biggest thing that this game has done for me and my kids. We now go to different areas and walk around. Sometimes its to parks, sometimes downtown, sometimes to waterfalls, or any other random public place that we typically don't go. How many other games actually encourage being active, and being outside your basement? It's also a bit like fishing, seeing who can get the highest CP pokemon.
Like it or not the latest generations (at least) sit more and exercise less, and video games worsen that as they encourage the kids to sit in a spot for 10 hours. Whats that? Force them to go outside and play? Some kids really aren't athletic or have a desire to be..and as a parent you could force your kid to exercise but that doesn't really work well. Sure when I grew up I was outside all the time..but then I grew up in a rural town of 28k, where all the housing and streets looked straight out of Leave it to Beaver. My kids are growing up in the inner city, and I'm not so concerned about kidnapping etc. as I am them having to cross dozens of intersections.
So yes, I'm sure the "fad" will fade a bit as it's newness loses its luster, but considering the unique benefits of the game it still is a fun, cute game that encourages social interaction and physical activity.
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encourage exercise
Call it what it is. It get's people out of their seats and outside doing the bare minimum, it does not encourage exercise. In fact I see more people walking past pokemon go players than the other way around.
No small wonder (Score:2)
The game is not particularly appellative, the group play is nil, my wife and I wanted to play together, and that really does not work out.
The pretence of augmented reality is there, but is not the first app using it, and the way they tied it to the game is a joke.
Plus, if you do not live or work nearby pokestops (I do, at least 4 or 5 pokestops at work), the game is something to forget about. Heck, even with the pokestops at hand, it is
Another one bites the dust (Score:2)
Thankfully, I can do more than one thing (Score:3)
I like playing Pokemon Go. It's something I can do when I have a few minutes to myself. I can also go walk around local parks and attractions with my wife or the whole family. Even my mom thought it was fun. We had a great time on vacation with it, whereas the kids might have complained about "being bored" on a hot day, they loved to go to the park and wander around catching Pokemon. It's a scavenger hunt that you can play alone or with others. I've spent a grand total of $5 on it, which is pretty good for something that provided hours of entertainment.
It's harder to play when I've got to work, and the kids are going back to school so we don't have as many opportunities to play. I'm betting less people play in the wintertime, anyway, since in many temperate zones you aren't going to want to be outside for hours when it's raining, snowing and generally unpleasant.
There are many directions they can take this game, and they can add new features like trading, PvP, etc. When new features come out, people can dust off their old accounts and re-engage, just in time for the spring/summer -- or maybe they roll out the features in the winter when there's likely to be less people playing.
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I like checking out the maps to see what gyms, etc. There are tons of stuff I have never seen before! :O
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Oh, totally. Now when I have a few minutes to kill I get out my phone and roam around rather than just sitting in the car bored. I've found interesting stuff in my town I never knew existed. The other big magic is that it drew my eight year old out on 95+ degree humid summer days to go to the park and get some exercise rather than saying it was too hot and having to drag her there.
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Or if you have a dog and your dog does this: http://static.boredpanda.com/b... [boredpanda.com] ... ;)
It was unnatural (Score:2)
Nerds getting outside and walking large distances is just not natural: we need to be behind our monitors, inside. However the normal situation is restoring itself. When autumn comes with lots of rain numbers will drop even more.
Not Counter-Strike (Score:2)
Until you make a game that requires practice and skill to be competitive, you won't have the staying power of games like CS and SC. People have been playing the original CS for over 15 years, and the new games are essentially the same game mechanics repackaged to keep us from buying a game once and playing it for 15 years.
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In Michigan, the weather has been fine and it's been a summer hit.
But the game is repetitive, and players who want to play "a little bit" can't compete in the arms race for good pokemon to fight in the gyms.
More activities and content needs to be added to the game to keep it fresh, and soon.
When the weather turns colder, it will be harder to maintain users in my neighborhood, at least.
Well, this how Pokemon games have been since back on Gameboy. It's the same thing, over and over.. You go to a town, you battle some people, you find some stuff, you leave town and you catch some Pokemon and you battle some people and then you find some stuff. It's not all that different, it's just that fad players are getting bored with it because they never played all the other games.
Also, "layers who want to play "a little bit" can't compete in the arms race for good pokemon to fight in the gyms." That
Re:The game needs more stuff to do (Score:5, Interesting)
In the case of PoGo, that would just mean your highest CP critter, in tiers of around 500-ish. Once you get something over CP1500, you could effectively enter an entirely new world (doesn't need to be explicit, although in keeping with the Pokemon theme, they could call it a new town/island/whatever), with gyms controlled by people in the same ballpark as you.
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(doesn't need to be explicit, although in keeping with the Pokemon theme, they could call it a new town/island/whatever),
That's exactly what would NOT work here as you're supposed to play in a setting that's recognizably your own town/city/island.
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Taking things a biiit too literal here, friend. Who says "your own town/country/planet" doesn't belong to "Dainisekai zone"? Or if it offends you that much, call them "leagues" - Up to CP500, you will only see and battle "shojo" league players.
However they frame it, Niantic has a really, really simple way to segregate players by skill, thereby keeping it fun for noobs and old-
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There is a very easy solution. Make the game skill based and hard rather than progressive achievement based and easy.
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"Just how it is and there's no real easy solution."
There is a very easy solution. Make the game skill based and hard rather than progressive achievement based and easy.
Skill based, like every game I listed? There's skill involved there and the more you play, typically the better you are. Which leads in to the issue I called out for casual gamers that aren't as skilled a jumping, with a sniper, and then quickly zoom aiming to head shot across the map.
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Yes, but you battle in the game, you even have to battle the wild pokemon to weaken them to catch them. Pokemon Go you just throw balls at them. And the one battle that is in the game is dull and has no strategy really beyond "Have the pokemon with the most CP!"
Re:The game needs more stuff to do (Score:5, Informative)
You can kill a pokemon with twice your CP if you know how to dodge its attacks properly and hit its weakness, i.e. "It's super effective"
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OK, not just me who noticed that about the "Battle System"...
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Well, true there have been some extreme server problems due to load. The worst one is when you can take the opponent down to 1 hp, but newer kill it.
But in a normal battle without lag, a vaporeon can kill a Flareon with twice the cp. And that is without doing any dodging.
Re:The game needs more stuff to do (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, this how Pokemon games have been since back on Gameboy. It's the same thing, over and over.. You go to a town, you battle some people, you find some stuff, you leave town and you catch some Pokemon and you battle some people and then you find some stuff. It's not all that different, it's just that fad players are getting bored with it because they never played all the other games.
Only in the same sense that Heavy Rain boils down to "you watch a cutscene, then you do a quicktime event and watch more cutscenes followed by more QTEs". Technically it's true on a certain level but it misrepresents the game and its appeal.
Your typical Pokemon game is focused on growth; you have to carefully build a team that can take on your opponents and you can't do that by constantly tossing out your 'mons. Training a 'mon up requires some time investment, thus you actually need to plan ahead instead of just going with whatever. Also, the various attacks actually make a difference and make the fights more complex than just "keep attacking until someone faints".
PG, on the other hand, has none of those elements. It barely even has fights and those fights don't really amount to anything. The meat of the game is literally to catch 'mons which become utterly useless shortly after when your level allows you to catch superior 'mons. There is nothing to achieve, no growth of any kind, no strategy or tactics. It's Pokemon without everything that made it interesting.
(And this comes from someone who was never a particularly big Pokemon fan and only played one of the first generation games. Even I can tell just how much PG is missing compared to the main series.)
Also the game isn't that social (Score:3)
Unlike the original Ingress. Pokemon Go doesn't really get better with friends. In Ingress playing with a friend can allow you to take down stronger portals faster, and it's the only way to build up stronger portals. You can make giant control fields.
In Pokemon Go as much as people in real life keep chiming on about how social it is. The game isn't social. Playing with friends isn't something the game encourages. It just happens because PoGo has such a large community. You don't run into people playing Poke
Re:No Shit. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's dropping because:
a) Many people cheated and thus have no reason to play it anymore, Nintendo has since broken the cheats.
b) It was released during summer when kids are out of school.
Come September, the kids will be back in school and not wandering around downtown cores looking for Pokemon.
That said, there are quite a few yet-unreleased Pokemon, so the game will have staying power for a while. I've walked past the spot that everyone hangs out locally and there are still 50 or so people hanging around when it probably peaked at about 300.
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The game is a massive tredmill. There is no way that someone with little time can be competative except for bots. Unless you live in NYC or someplace similar you can't get enough pokeballs to play without paying a fortune buying them from the store.
Configuring and tweaking bots was far more fun than the game.
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>> There is no way that someone with little time can be competative except for bots.
This, and the only real"battling" in the game is Gym Battles currently, and those are dull even if you do have a built-up team....
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Man, in New Orleans, and the suburbs there are Pokestops every other block, often multiple ones right beside each other...easy to get stocked up on poke balls and such.
The other night, I had to keep throwing stuff out of my 'bag' to make room for more things I
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Re:No Shit. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Pet Rock (Score:4, Funny)
This Pokemon Go shit is the electronic equivalent of the Pet Rock, Tickle Me Elmo, Cabbage Patch Doll, etc.
Useless.
Salty much, bitch? [xkcd.com]
Re:Pet Rock (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlike the usefulness of most other games?
If it brings the user a fun experience, then it is useful.
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My daughter ( 7 ) was nuts over it when it came out. But you walk around, try to catch Pokemon, not by battling them and weakening them first, but by just throwing a limited resource (Pokeballs) until you catch one. Then you run out of Pokeballs and there's not much to do unless you are already high level and have spent a lot of time and/or money building a team for gyms. That's the only kind of Pokemon Battle in the game currently, and it's kinda really dull, no real strategy to it at all.
She has no in
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I saw this a mile away. Pokemon is not a "team" game, it is an individual game, that can be played in groups. The group aspect isn't even necessary for the game itself, it is more social than game related.
Because there is very little interaction required among players, players aren't engaged with each other. Eventually you catch them all and then what?
If you are tired of Pokemon, but like the VR world, might I suggest you try Ingress. There are multiple facets to Ingress, you can play alone, as part of a te
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Lore? Pokemon Go has Lore? ;)
Re: Pet Rock (Score:2)
Re:Pet Rock (Score:4, Interesting)
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Sure, the only really unpredictable aspect of this scenario is the size of the peak. If their business plans were predicated on maintaining usage near the initial peak indefinitely, then they were stupid plans.
I'm guessing that the plans for this product aren't that stupid. In that case a sensible goal will be to maintain a modest but loyal group of regular users and to periodically introduce new features that will entice usage jags out of occasional players.
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And how will those plans survive those "filthy casuals" that will never spend a dime on the game....
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That's the problem: PG isn't very fun.
It CAN'T BE fun!
It it was fun, people would actually play it to progress instead of buying pokeballs from the shop.
Now, tor a game to be successful, it has to be some boring grind that people would want to pay for to avoid.....
And that's why we can't have nice things.
Re:Pet Rock (Score:4, Insightful)
Useless.
I have zero interest in Pokemon Go but that's an asinine point. Videogames are not meant to be useful. At all.
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This is as ignorant as the statement you replied to.
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"equivalent of the Pet Rock"
The guy made a million dollars!
Predicted by: (Score:2)
Especially due to the limitations and bias against new players and non-whales.
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True
"and you can quickly play to endgame content"
True, but I doubt even one legitimate player got anywhere near level 30. You can quickly play end game content because it's the same as start of game content. The problem is the same as all mmo's, instead of skill based play it is an acculation treadmill.
These games need to take out any and all forms of advantage accumulation over time. A 240 game hour character/account should have absolutely zero advantage over a 30 minute play
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it already has a mortal enemy that is right WINTER IS COMING!
Let me tell you about a little place I like to call: the southern hemisphere.
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THIS....!!
Down here in New Orleans, its so damned hot, all you can do to avoid heat stroke and play is to roll about in your car and play with the AC on high.
Down here, the AC in my house doesn't usually cut off from about April till November. I'm looking forward to cooler weather starting to hit in the next couple months.
I guess there's a lot of people up in the
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FWIW, I actually think that if they were to put in some effort, they really could fix it. Just think up a game (or two or three or ten), and add that to it. Treat the previous work as background/setting/universe_creation. Mapping the universe onto the real world was a good idea and I think we're going to see a lot more of that happening in the near future.
Well that's what they did - they put all that effort into Ingress. PokeGo was the culmination of all the crowd-sourced locations and some of the gameplay (battling for control of Gyms / Portals).
Augmented reality does look to be the future of gaming (much more so than "virtual reality"). The problem with Ingress and PokeGo that Niantic doesn't seem interested in solving is that a small group of dedicated and coordinated player can ruin the game for everyone else over a fairly large area.
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If that is "all their effort" then Niantic obviously does not have the resources to pull off something on the scale of PG successfully. They can barely keep the much smaller Ingress going!
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I've never played Pokemon Go, but from what I know of it, you don't have to deal with 10% of the bullshit you have to deal with when actually trying to work to improve your neighborhood. The game sounds boring to me, and certainly is a fad, but for some people I imagine it is at least somewhat entertaining and allows them to put aside their problems for a little while. Neighborhood improvement is hard work that pays off in the end, but it isn't recreational in the slightest.
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I expect the "speed lock" was in the original copy and paste from the Ingress code that Niantic used to create Pokemon Go from.
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They made it impossible to play while riding as a passenger in a car
No they didn't. My son uses my wife's phone, launches the app, it says you are going too fast, he taps 'i am a passenger'* and then usually catches 3-4 on the drive to wherever as well as picking up supplies.
* Somewhat amusingly "I am a passenger" is the only option it presents when tripping the speed lock. No "Cancel" option.
Also somewhat amusingly, he triggered the speedlock during a walk. Not even a particularly fast walk. Again, he hit 'I am a passenger'. Perhaps the button should say "I'm not driving".
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idiot drivers can just hit "I am a passenger" and merrily proceed to kill themselves and others around them.
indeed, but niantic's legal department is satisfied that they had to intentionally bypass that screen to do so.
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huh?
yes you can play it in the car. A message pops up asking if you are a passenger and you say yes. After that you can catch pokemon, click on pokestops, etc. The only issue is depending on the speed of travel you have to be very quick with the pokestops and gyms..
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