
Ask HN: Are the Pokemon Go articles real, or is their PR firm amazing? - somid3
News outlets are typically very slow for new startups, venture, products, etc. Specially mass-consumer outlets&#x2F; I can&#x27;t imagine how in a single week there are 100&#x27;s of articles on Pokemon Go. Any thoughts?
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rwhitman
I haven't played it, but pretty much every time I look out the window of my
apartment here in NYC there are random people wandering aimlessly around my
block with their phone pointed in weird directions. I have friends and family
in my hometown telling me all sorts of stories about swarming amusement parks,
masses of kids out in the street etc...

Genuinely viral, not a PR blitz. The network effect of human activity in close
proximity, physically gathering in already crowded public spaces, and then
spreading to areas of non-players is probably the key viral component on this
one. Someone sees other people on the street playing it, they check it out,
explore other areas, the network grows and so on.

Likely more effective virally than social networks because it's a well
developed game mechanic - skill, mastery, rewards etc - and apparently it
encourages strangers to interact, not just existing social circles. So the
activity leaps over the "tribal" firewall.

It just turns out that viral social media manifested in the real world starts
resembling an actual virus.

~~~
angryasian
absolutely agree, this is one of the first occurrences of socially viral that
I've seen at this scale that exists outside of a persons immediate social
graph. Theres no share with friends on social networks. Its more about going
to locations, seeing people playing it and sharing what pokemon are available,
or who's your most rare pokemon.

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_jdams
Pokémon is one of the biggest franchises in the world. It's like the
McDonald's of gaming, and the people that grew up consuming it are now in
their 20s-30s and extremely active on Social Media.

Before major news outlets pick it up, micro-blogs, niche blogs for gaming, and
other entertainment media outlets are going to publish stories about it, and
the content writers of those sites are all the demographic that grew up with
Pokémon, so it's no surprise really.

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samfisher83
Pokemon is a 50 billion dollar franchise. It has made billions of dollars for
its owners. The franchise has made more profits than twitter, Facebook and
maybe a few other unicorns combined.

Its not that surprising it is doing well.

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ovt
I was wondering this as well because...pokemon came along...when? After my
time, anyway, like late 90s.

And then kind of died down, I think, or at least wasn't a monstrous craze at
least.

And now in 2016, does it mean that everyone who was super into them 15 years
ago is all for it?

If I think about what I was super into at 10, the nostalgia doesn't go that
far today.

I mean I see I'm late to the party here and everyone's already said it's real,
but I was just surprised.

Around 2007, for some months there, the world was saturated with articles
about Second Life. Eventually I saw an article about how it had come about as
a result of hiring a new PR firm.

(Or has nostalgia changed? At least if I imagine giving 1940s kids something
connected to that in 1965, it seems like they'd be like "Um, I'm a grown
wo/man." But today hollyworld is all superhero movies.)

Bonus question: How long before we grow really sick of hearing about it?

~~~
dhruvkar
> And now in 2016, does it mean that everyone who was super into them 15 years
> ago is all for it?

Almost embarrased to say, I played pokemon back in good old black-and-white
gameboy days. Then I played Pokemon for a two-month stretch last year and was
highly dissapointed there wasn't an app for it.

I've yet to download Pokemon Go, but that's only because I have 12.1 MB of
free space left on my phone.

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wallflower
My cousins played Pokémon in elementary school. They were obsessed. They
invited me to play a couple games when I visited them (I had no idea which
Pokémons were good). Now, they are graduating college. It is an entire
generation that was raised on Pokémon, now starting their millenial lives.

It's probably the most interesting thing that has happened in games since
Minecraft. Mobile games were stuck on Bejeweled clones or even more upmarket
stuff like Clash of Clans. This almost guarantees a shift in development
dollars towards AR.

Seeing Pokémon Go players in person is a little disconcerting though. They are
more 'out of it' than usual, where 'out of it' baseline is the person texting
while walking down the street.

~~~
maushu
Just wait when they mix VR with AR and we see people with Vive/Oculus-like
helmets on the street.

~~~
fosco
made me think of this [0]

[0] [http://hyper-reality.co/](http://hyper-reality.co/)

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angryasian
The buzz for this game is very real. I've been in SF and LA over the last week
and you see people walking around everywhere with this game on. The only
question is that because of the barrier of having to be in physical locations
and having to walk/drive is this game sustainable. I think with additional
game mechanics niantic can definitely make this a long term hit.

~~~
psyc
I think that if you ever leave the house at all, you can play no matter what
else you're doing. Today, I went to an appointment, and there was a Pokemon in
front of the building. I went to the store - there were 3 outside. I went to a
large park - there were numerous Pokemon, PokeStops, and gyms. I didn't go to
any of these places to play the game.

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captainmuon
Actually I've been wondering if a PR agency has been running a huge campaign
_against_ Pokemon Go. There were a bunch of articles last week:

\- People sent to churches and graveyards

\- One person found a dead body while playing

\- Someone supposedly had an accident while playing in the car

\- One black person pointing he couldn't play the game safely as it would be
dangerous to wander around aimlessly as a black guy in the city

\- A bunch of inappropriate places like strip clubs were included

This seems to me like the next candidate for overblown, unjustified outrage.
Like D&D in the 80s, or Google Glass recently. I'm just waiting for Moms
Against Pokemon Go.

~~~
tedmiston
It does seem like the locations they've chosen for pokéstops are biased
towards churches and public gathering spaces like courthouse squares. I'm not
sure if this is intentional.

Source: I live in one of the most historic neighborhoods in the US (many old
buildings and churches).

~~~
jpindar
They are located where Ingress portals are, which were specifically intended
to be local places of interest - monuments, courthouses, schools, churches
etc.

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crazypyro
No, I think it's just actually that popular of a franchise. A ton of my
friends (early 20's) are talking about it on Facebook to the point where its a
large portion of my entire newsfeed.

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k__
Well, Niantic already had their first successful product years ago, so I
wouldn't call them a startup anymore.

Also they riding on a 20 year old hype train that had nothing to do with them.

So it's in the news because of The Pokemon Company, Nintendo and
Google/Alphabet.

~~~
angryasian
Niantic is no longer part of Google (never part of Alphabet),they spun off to
their own entity.

~~~
k__
I never said that it is.

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bjourne
In Stockholm, I've observed two different people taking photographs of stuff
for their Pokémon Go collection or whatever it is. It's spreading quickly like
the Harlem Shake, Ice Bucket Challenge and the Gagnam Style video of the past.

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chatmasta
Definitely genuinely viral (although of course that does not preclude the
pokemon PR people from pushing articles!)

I'm not surprised. I have multiple friends who bought Nintendo 3DS's to play
Pokemon over the past couple years... mind you, these are not nerdy kids. They
are mainstream friends who are not gamers. They've been openly playing pokemon
and there has been zero stigma attached to it.

I think what's most amazing about this latest craze is that it managed to
attract these mainstream, non-gamers. My Facebook feed (early 20s college
educated) is seriously 20-30% Pokemon posts. And it's not the nerdy kids
posting screenshots, it's people you would never expect, evenly distributed
across genders.

Can you imagine people sharing screenshots of their world of warcraft quests
on facebook?!

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NamTaf
See all these people in the below photos? They're playing it. At night. In a
public park. I walked through there at midnight on Saturday night and it was
just as busy. During the day it's even more so. Walking through just about any
inner-suburban public park currently involves watching groups of 20somethings
scurry around trying to locate pokemon.

It has been explosively successful in the traditionally non-gamer markets.
News outlets are picking it up because it's so ubiquous.

[https://media.apnarm.net.au/img/media/images/2016/07/11/b882...](https://media.apnarm.net.au/img/media/images/2016/07/11/b88209160z1_20160711103440_000g007q8252-0-7384a3rh63fdn4m0jm2_t460.jpg)

[https://media.apnarm.net.au/img/media/images/2016/07/11/b882...](https://media.apnarm.net.au/img/media/images/2016/07/11/b88209160z1_20160711103440_000g007q81c2-0-5o5pjfvj8vp5v4m0jm2_t460.jpg)

~~~
brotchie
Really interested in the behavioural dynamics that caused this specific area
to be the "go to" place in Brisbane for Pokemon. I get off at that Southbank
CityCat stop on my daily commute and have seen this crowd grow almost
exponentially.

On the day of launch, there wasn't many people there. Second day I had a chat
to about 15 people who were gathered (nobody knew each other and were there
because of the 3x lured Pokestops in close proximity). Day four was then 100+
people. Now from afternoon onwards there's a persistent crowd.

PokeGo has been the quickly-to-viral thing I've ever seen. Even on day two we
could sit looking out the office window and every 5th person was playing.

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MyNewAcc
My girlfriend who never plays video games had me walking around the
neighboorhood with her, catching pokemon. This is the real deal, not PR.

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bbcbasic
Read about PoGo players wandering into courthouses taking pictures and getting
into trouble in Sydney.

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31reasons
Pied Piper moment of technology (the original story not the HBO show!)

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miguelrochefort
Dude.

