
The Magic of Harry Potter Is Coming to a Neighborhood Near You - arikr
https://nianticlabs.com/blog/wizardsunite/
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yoodenvranx
This is going to be the same shitshow as Ingress and PoGo. Niantic has two of
the potentially greatest games in modern history but they somehow manage to
continually piss of their whole userbase.

Niantic has proven again and again and again that they are completely
incompetent when it comes to a) communication with their fanbase, b)
development of good content and c) quality control.

They had 5 years and hundreds of millions of dollars and what do we get? A
completely stagnant Ingress with no new features in a long time and a
completely boring and bug-ridden Pokemon Go which rapidly loses players.

Don't get hyped about anything Niantic is doing, you will just get
disappointed even if you already had low expectations.

I really really hope a competent game company picks up where Niantic fails and
releases truly great AR games.

~~~
jdminhbg
Serious question, as I am not a gamer: Why are they so successful? Why doesn’t
someone just do the same real-world-including game style but with scalability?
Are they much better at game design than other people? Better at acquiring IP
rights? Something else?

~~~
on_and_off
They got a lot of shit for scalability issues but their initial success just
took them by surprise, like everyone else in the industry.

IIRC they had at least an order of magnitude more users than their more
optimistic estimations.

It does not excuse everything but their initial scaling issues are pretty
understandable

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benmarks
I live in a tourist area on the southeast Atlantic coast, and I absolutely
enjoyed all of the families running around in the streets when Pokémon Go came
out. I do hope that Niantic have ramped up both infrastructure and support.

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berbec
Despite my frustration at Ingress and annoyance at Pokémon Go, I'm not too
proud to admit it:

"You had me at Hello"

I will be playing on day one. I'm holding out hope they can catch the hype-
lightning of Pokémon, the innovation of Ingress, the wonder of the Wizarding
World of Harry Potter (TM) and add a vital third part the other games lacked:
long-term fun.

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jandrese
Hopefully this isn't as thin and poorly supported as the Pokémon game. The
description makes it sound rather similar.

~~~
jff
The Pokemon game was itself just a slightly modified version of Ingress!

~~~
berbec
Honestly, you could almost call it an Ingress "theme" or "skin".

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forkLding
I really hope this is the future of games, it helps people be more social and
get outside of their homes and connect over something very nerdy. I remember
being out at 2am and following a huge crowd for catching a Lapras. It was
definitely something different and a lot more social than being in front of a
computer.

~~~
germainelol
I don't see it as any more social to be honest. I live in Hong Kong, and
people walking on their phones was already bad enough before games like
Pokemon Go came out. It's not fun when you have to weave around people walking
at a snail's pace on their phone, or have to bump shoulders with every other
person because they don't see you until you're on top of their feet. My
personal favourite is when people genuinely stand at traffic lights for 5
minutes because they don't realise the lights have even turned green.

~~~
forkLding
I meant more social by comparing to playing computer and video games at home.
Actually funny anecdote, the crowd I was in blocked traffic for 5 to 10
minutes by jaywalking (it was that big). I didn't join them but I definitely
see your point.

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xahrepap
Here's what they should do... Make one game and let users choose their
theme/skin. License different themes from companies (Harry Potter, Pokemon,
etc). Then whatever mode a person is in when they buy stuff, that IP gets a
cut.

And then: make that game fun.

~~~
berbec
That's what they seem to have done. As I remember, my wife's pokestops matched
my ingress hubs 1:1. They made the backend on Ingress, and are licensing and
skinning it now.

~~~
kyle-rb
Well yeah, the landmark location data is sourced from Ingress, but to be fair
a lot of that is originally from Google Maps, since Niantic started out of
Google.

~~~
berbec
Right, but only ingress landmarks are in pokemon go and I saw no pokemon go
landmarks not in ingress. So i'ts not just picking gMaps, it's picking
directly from Ingress.

