There's been a lot of community backlash in Pokemon Go (#HearUsNiantic Niantic movement)and the game director response to it was that the company has “no plans to directly address any of [it]” [0]
The fan base is very loyal to the Pokemon brand and it really feels Pokemon Go is successful despite all of Niantic's shenanigans.
Woah! As someone who hasn't paid much attention since the initial launch, I had no idea. Here's the business model:
> Besides in-game purchases, partnerships with retail chains like Starbucks, McDonald's, Sprint, pay Niantic Labs for "Foot Traffic" on-demand of the retail shops.
I'm pretty sure they're referencing John Hanke, who used to work for the U.S. govt, founded Keyhole through funding from In-Q-Tel (CIA's VC), which ended up spawning Niantic.
It seems they're actively working with the NGA, NSA, DIA, and CIA. It could be just for 3D geo-spatial tech, or it could be for sharing data. It's secret and it doesn't look like conclusive evidence of data sharing has been published. My personal belief is a little bit of both is going on.
Some of their decisions do the opposite, especially the recent limitation of five remote raid passes used per day. It used to be unlimited, and of course they have a way to purchase game coins that are then used to purchase those passes.
IMO this was more in line with their original principles over profits (that you ought to walk outside to do a raid at a gym, rather than going on Discord to get a remote invite and use a pass you purchased with pokecoins). But I find the game boring and tedious anyway.
The article suggests they make lots of money from partnerships with people like mcdonalds to bring people near to a branch by putting pokestops there. I'd guess the deal is along the lines of "we'll pay you 30 cents for each person you get to our front door".
For that to work, you don't want a few whales - you want as many hungry mcdonalds lovers as possible...
It’s really easy to forget that their target market isn’t us the adults who love Pokémon. In reality, they have hooked a generation of children that spend >$1B on the game each year so I think they’re doing just fine
Hmmm. Citation needed. Am an active player. All the whales in the communities are adults.
Maybe you mean a generation of children as in children in the 90s), but even that's not true, as there's plenty of folks > 40yrs old, too. They've got multiple groups hooked.
My wife and I play to, but infrequently, but they aren't really pushing you heavily to buying anything. In fact there isn't much to buy in their store at all, so I am a little impressed that they make that much money.
I find it interesting that Nintendo fans can recognize they are slaves to the IP, but they don't change their buying habits.
For instance, if BOTW was released under a different IP skin and released for xbox, it would probably be a 6-8/10.
Since we were marketed to as children, I think we have limited free will when nostalgia comes up. We automatically give our childhood friends(corporate mascots) a pass on quality.
I am guilty, I keep playing every Zelda religiously, despite thinking BOTW wasnt good, I still plan to play TotK. I don't know why I do it. I feel like I need to play it.
I might have been a pokemon go addict, but the closest pokecenter(or whatever) was like a 5 minute drive/10 minute walk away.
Scary stuff. I know some people who are similar with Disney IP.
> For instance, if BOTW was released under a different IP skin and released for xbox, it would probably be a 6-8/10.
Hard disagree. I was a PC gamer since forever and decided to buy a Switch when I had to travel a lot (pre-Steam-Deck days). BoTW was my first Zelda game (and second Nintendo game ever, after playing Mario on PC). I'm not a Nintendo fan, I'm not a Zelda fan, and I still consider BoTW to be a 10/10 game. It's the best game I've played in years and it's in my top 3 games of all time. The only quibble I have is with the crafting system, but I'm not big on crafting in any game, everything else is perfect: combat, open-world roaming, pacing, puzzles, character design, level design - everything. Nothing was half-assed.
> For instance, if BOTW was released under a different IP skin and released for xbox, it would probably be a 6-8/10.
If released today, then maybe. BOTW being a good game has nothing to do with it being on the switch. Getting enough audience immediately to be a phenomenon and enough people/press interested in it to spend time so it it got enough reviews that everyone saw them, sure, but the game itself is extremely good based on most people's opinions I've heard, even people that are routinely playing Xbox, PS or PC games.
I think perhaps your experience is colored by you not quite liking it as much as others so assuming it was nostalgia goggles. I can assure you, in many many cases (IMO the vast majority of them), that's not what was going on.
> I am guilty, I keep playing every Zelda religiously, despite thinking BOTW wasnt good, I still plan to play TotK. I don't know why I do it. I feel like I need to play it.
I felt like this back when Metroid Prime came out. It was okay, and fun, but I also didn't really feel a huge urge to play the next game in the series, and I haven't played a Metroid in some time (even though metroidvania is one of my favorite genres and I play other games in it).
Different people like different aspects of games. Sometimes games lean into one aspect or another, often when there's a major shift in them (such as 2d to 3d, but not always), and people that likes that aspect are happy and people that weren't as interested in that aspect may be disappointed to varying degrees.
For me, Zelda was always at least partially about exploring everything. I remember revisiting every screen on the map over and over after I got new items to see if I could get to new areas of do new things. BotW brought that in spades, since you could literally go everywhere, and that was rarely done as well in prior games on any systems (it gets easier/possible to get to new sub-areas as the game progresses and you get more stamina, which is a nice way to promote revisiting areas to explore where you couldn't get previously, or novel approaches to getting to areas). I'm sure some people dislike that, or feel bored by it, but many do not.
> For instance, if BOTW was released under a different IP skin and released for xbox, it would probably be a 6-8/10.
This reads like an attempt to justify why you didn't like the game but other people did. You know, you can just say "games are subjective" without reaching into this whole meta theory that people are slaves or somehow don't know what a good game is.
Now that all these Niantic employees have some free time on their hands, anybody wanna collab on making pokemon go but for actual species in different locations? iNaturalist is a crowd-data citizen science platform where people post observations of any species ever and others help to identify. A really rich source of data to play with. Perhaps you can get some sort of playing card everytime you've submitted a "research-grade" observation to the platform. People travel to different countries for specific pokemon. Imagine doing this but for actual species of plants/animals. Imagine sitting down and researching migration patterns of a rare bird to be one of the few to have it in your collection
iNaturalist is already integrated with the Seek app, which has badges and challenges. My biggest complaint is the image detection could be better, but I’m sure there’s plenty of room to improve the gamification aspect too.
Yes I use Seek. It's primarily just iNaturalist's identification AI with a tiny bit of gamification. Badges are cute but it doesn't really go past "observe 10 bird species", "observe 100 bird species", "observe 1,000 bird species", etc. There's monthly challenges too but they're usually just "observe 10 [herbivores|parasitic plants|species in protected areas|etc]". Don't get me wrong I love the app and everything iNaturalist is doing but it's not a full-featured game by any means
wow this actually got upvoted really fast. It's an idea that's been bouncing around in my head for a long time now so I'm glad to see excitement about it even though I shoehorned it in to a barely-relevant HN thread (sorry). It should be really easy to get an MVP of this idea going given that the data is already there. The biggest design struggle I've actually had with it is figuring out an actual engaging game to make with it. It could be something like CryptoKitties (sorry to bring up NFTs but I think those ideas often have the same problem. They have a good "collection" idea at the root and then aren't really sure what to do with that collection) where you mainly maintain a collection and then "games" are a layer on top of that that anyone can make with the underlying data. Hope this isn't against the rules, but my email is in my bio if anyone's serious about furthering this idea or just wants to chat about it
eBird is also cool. Both projects contribute their data to GBIF. But I'm more of an amateur botanist than a birder. I've actually found that more birders use iNaturalist than eBird also despite eBird being focused more on birds specifically
It's wild to me that Pokémon GO is still so profitable. The way it penetrated the mainstream years ago was crazy to witness (people of all ages just walking around town playing it). Then it just sort of vanished from public daily life, but somehow it lives on much more discretely.
People outside the media, and games especially, underestimate the value of a big cross-media IP. If you end up working on them you find they are orders of magnitude larger in revenue terms and the spikiness of the business (in terms of surges of new users without needing advertising etc.) is unbelievable. The downside is the cost of entry is enormous.
The surprising part is which IPs have these hungry fanbases is not immediately obvious. I know some of those affected today are well aware of this and would assume that for whatever reason the dots didn't join up between the NBA or Marvel audiences and the sort of games Niantic make.
Was that the concept? That sounds like a painful grind to me; there's not _that_ many basketball hoops all next to each other walking distance and then you have to carry a ball around too!
it’s far more likely it was just a reskin of Pokémon go but you’re trying to collect players instead, and to recruit them you’d have to shoot virtual baskets or something by flicking a basketball instead of a pokeball
Having a small enthralled group of gamers is enough to make a lot of money. There are many, many, communities playing old online games serviced by small studios or as side projects of larger corporations.
Its a shame seemingly our entire industry has adopted a "Make 10s of Billions or GTFO" mentality for its projects. A lot is being lost by ignoring the "make a small beloved product" route.
The scene is very active, still. Here in germany the same old guys play this game for years now. They drive around in vans with USB connectors and filled with like 6 people. Its actually a cool way to find friends and interact with people if you are a nerd.
There's still a very active Ingress community in my area which is both good and bad. Good if you want to play because you can get some friends together and frack for high level gear, good because friendly competition makes the game stronger since progress relies in part on turnover. Bad, unfortunately, because some of the most hard core players are the most toxic. We're talking people who run multiple accounts, stalk players, scrape data to ensure (back when that was a thing) you could never get a guardian, location spoof, etc. Like a lot of other games (Eve Online, for example) the lack of sharding favors the trolls. And by trolls I mean the people who clearly consider the most fun part of the game to be ruining it for everyone else.
it would be fun to see "Monster Hunter" get some more exposure in the West, it's got an approach to character development different from the average RPG where you don't level up but instead progress through getting better equipment and "gitting gud".
It is so much easier to keep an online game running than it is to launch a new one, that's some of why I was shocked by Meta shutting down Echo VR. Sure they don't think Echo VR has the potential to get big enough to move the needle for them, but there's a lot of risk a new game won't get any traction at all.
I have a poke stop next to my house. I see random cars pulled up there all hours of the night. I'm not worried about any robbers at this point. It's always someone looking at their phone for about 5-10 minutes and driving off. Last week there was a dude there in the dark. I just yelled out from my driveway (100 feet away) "you catch em all"... response was a sigh and "not yet". Guy was gone 3 minutes later.
It's like the video game equivalent of a smoke break at this point. Just a little thing to do.
There's a QA guy at the bar by my house who has 5 phones with him when he's drinking. 3 are pokemon, 2 are for work... 50% tho on if he works for niantic, hope he's still got a job. I live real close to their seattle office.
I don't think they ever needed the enormous crowds. That was helpful for getting the word out that the game existed and now everyone knows, but the truly devoted Pokemon fans are maniacs about it, and enough people are willing to spend either enormous time, enormous money, or both to keep playing. The core audience that grew up with this stuff is also mid-40s now, in the career stage where they finally have a lot of disposable income and probably young kids at the right age to introduce them to Pokemon, too. The IP on its own is so valuable, I'm not even sure the game itself needs to be that good.
It disappeared because they changed the game to require more grinding and more hassle. They tweaked the skinner box to the point people weren't excited to play it, so they stopped.
Because the point is not to have a billion casual players, but rather tens of thousands of whales to milk extensively.
The ROI of catering to casual people who might see a couple ads and never spend a dime is just silly compared to taking thousands of dollars a month from tens of thousands of addicts.
Is there any battling? You collect Pokemon in real world locations...that's kind of neat..but what's the game beyond collecting pokemon and bragging about all the different ones you've collected?
> At the end of March, Niantic nearly doubled the price of remote raid passes, an extremely popular in-app item. The company’s reasoning is that remote play options were essential during pandemic lockdowns, but they go against Niantic’s vision for the game, which is to get people outside to play together in person. Players don’t feel that way, though. Some even chose to boycott Pokémon GO in protest. While their protest may not have caught Niantic’s attention, its in-app purchase sales likely did.
So the higher price looks more profitable to them if you completely ignore the fact that the set an upper limit on how many you'll be able to use daily.
I honestly despise much of the community dedicated to hating this game because half of the time the reasoning is the pandemic isn't over yet! The game sucks despite Niantic having a vision for it where people actually have to go outside and walk.
They also made a category of raids where you can not use a remote pass to participate.
It further reinforces that the game is made for city dwellers. The suburbs and rural areas are funny places that one might visit from time to time, but noting to concern yourself about.
At least Niantic's CEO is honest when they say the real reason they're laying people off is because of the excess hiring they did during covid when white-collar workers and many kids were stuck at home and glued to their phones/laptops.
Also makes sense to cancel new games, I'm sure people are tightening their belts and spending less on purchases like microtransactions that have already been slowly going up to maintain more profits quarter after quarter.
Heck, I even got an email from Epic saying any games that use virtual currencies will be going up in price due to "inflation and current economic conditions".
> Due to inflation the exchange rate for our imaginary currency went down. Oh! Also there is inflation in the fictional universe so fictional prices have gone up as well, sorry about that!
The thing with Niantic games though is that you actually have to go places! To be fair, they managed to pivot a bit during COVID and allow game play at home which kept some players engaged.
I still miss the earlier days when we would have 20+ players across the island collaborating to complete self-designed Ops. Happens more less often now.
Multiple tech companies have said that. I really wonder about why any of these CEOs thought it was a permanent state of affairs though. The prior example, the Spanish Flu, was fought with lower tech and science and lasted what 3-4 years?
They thought a major cultural shift was occurring and wanted to be positioned for it. Do you think things are totally back to pre-pandemic re: remote / in person work for example? Perhaps that's a legitimate culture shift re: how we work that happened due to the pandemic.
The success of smartphone AR games seems almost entirely dependent on the IP they are designed around. Pokemon seems perfectly suited towards the model and I struggle to think of any other franchise that has enough going for it to be an engaging AR game. Although plenty of other IP's have tried to make their own Pokemon Go.
Given Pokémon Go is basically the only successful AR game and it definitely owes its success to Pokémon’s IP (IMO the gameplay actually sucks), and I haven’t seen any other AR games with compelling gameplay, I agree. But I think someone could make an AR game that can stand on its own - AR is just a medium, and there are plenty of regular games and mobile games that made tons of money with new IP.
Reskinning existing IP for an entirely new game like in Pokémon Go can be thought of similarly to a marketing expense. For the amount it costs to license the IP, you could allocate more money to original IP or other marketing.
I no next to nothing about mobile games so I'm now curious. Is there a counter example you can provide where top tier IP was unsuccessful because the app/game/experience was so bad? I see a lot of this on reddit usually around "regular" video games where everyone says the won't prebuy or purchase a game because of past studio bugs or generally bad user/community experience but ultimately these games and studios still crush it. So I would definitely agree with your appraisal just kind of curious if there is a floor you can hit that is so bad that a game still fails still being an amazing IP.
If anything, history shows the opposite. There are some IPs that are so valuable that you could release absolute trash and still make a killing from the dedicated fans.
I enjoyed the Harry Potter games I've played and have played pretty much every "monster" game that exists (Pokemon, Digimon, DQ: Monsters, Monster Rancher, etc). As a fan, I'm sorry to say I don't see myself being interested in a Fantastic Beasts game. I would love to be proven wrong... maybe it's because I didn't enjoy the movies but I don't hear anyone mention fantastic beasts for any reason, good or otherwise.
I think it's interesting to consider games that took off so wildly they literally killed/stifled the genre.
Has anything similar matched World of Warcraft? It was a cultural phenomena when it launched and so many big studios tried to capture it, but none did to that level. It's more niche now.
Pokemon Go seems like that but to an extreme. Maybe it's the traction required for IRL video games to take off, maybe it's just Pokemon was definitively one of the best franchises for that style of game.
I find it odd to see so many people here who didn't know Pokemon Go was still "a thing" because they dropped off the fad a month after launch.
To be fair, Pokemon Go is really only balanced for play in dense urban centers, which excludes a lot of Americans who thought the game was just an AR gimmick. It wasn't, and there's a lot of people who play it even if they live in suburbia. But that doesn't mean the game died, it just means it's niche.
More generally I'm kinda sick of game genres that used to be mainstream being treated as dead fads. A lot of stuff is way more evergreen than people give it credit for, you just need to find a balance of people who are willing to keep playing. And while I'm riding this train...
- Guitar games never actually died out. Harmonix actually made a Rock Band 4 that's still getting DLC, and there's a big community around Clone Hero. If you don't feel like filling your home with plastic rhythm game controllers again[0], your local Dave & Busters probably also has a GH Arcade cabinet[1].
- Nintendo still releases new amiibo! I don't even know if they've come up with anything more compelling than just "tap figure to get bonus items" or "weird kind of Smash CPU that you have to level up" though.
- Konami never stopped making DDR. It's just way harder to actually find a DDR cabinet in the US due to #FucKonami's asinine licensing policies[1]. If you don't have one in your city[2] there's probably at least someone running a StepManiaX or Pump It Up cab.
- Tamagotchi is still a thing. Hell, Bandai actually makes way more of them now, because they realized they could sell a lot of licensed tie-in Tamas.
[0] We don't talk about Guitar Hero Live.
[1] I'm not mentioning Gitadora/Guitar Freaks for the same reason why DDR is a pain in the ass to find in the US.
[2] e-Amusement means cabs are region-locked, won't boot unless they're online, and operators need to pay a revshare to Konami. Furthermore they will only sell cabs to D&B and Round1. This means a lot of arcades just don't have new Konami games.
In the past, this didn't matter because a lot of smaller US arcade operators were just buying import cabs. This is actually illegal, but it gave DDR a lot more street presence here than Konami would have otherwise gotten.
> I find it odd to see so many people here who didn't know Pokemon Go was still "a thing"
Why? There are an infinite number of “things” in the world and I’m aware of maybe a half dozen. Why would I know or care that Pokemon Go is still active?
After the immediate success of Pokémon GO, I was curious what happens next in the AR game space. Niantic also stimulated people to take additional photos of objects for their platform, so I expected something new to appear.
But unfortunately, for some reason, everyone including Niantic just does the same game with different setting. So disappointing:(
This is by design to create perceived value in the 100 for 0.99 bundle.
Reminds me of an old joke:
> His pricelist reads: 1 for $3, 3 for $10
> A young man stops by and asks to buy one watermelon. "That'd be 3 dollars", says the old man.
> The young man then buys another one, and another one, paying $3 for each.
> As the young man is walking away, he turns around, grins, and says, "Hey old man, do you realize I just bought three watermelons for only $9? Maybe business is not your thing."
> The old man smiles and mumbles to himself, "People are funny. Every time they buy three watermelons instead of one, yet they keep trying to teach me how to do business..."
Newsflash: If you are a game company this is a feature not a bug.
Also, if you want to get into a mobile game dark pattern try this:
- 100 coins 0.99, 550 coins $6.99
After you buy 100 coins pricing switches to:
- 100 coins 1.49, 550 coins $6.99
Usually you have mechanics like that with pseudo currency, not actual $ because it is too obvious. But understand their are no accidents in pricing at that level of development.
If there is anyone at Niantic who is familiar with the inner workings of the gaming and AR experiences and how to go about that or make a better version I'd love to talk! I'm building the real world version of Pokemon go for places at summer.ai.
No surprise. Smartphone AR games were a fad, and no one is playing any of them anymore. Niantic should have just sold itself at the top like King and others.
Smartphone games in general are still a big business. King's problems were (1) it had no moat, and (2) the strategy of "get people to spam their friends about game activities on Facebook" was squashed. Today it seems people depend on paid ads on the app store and elsewhere which is moaty for the ad exchange but not for publisher.
I think the potential of AR games is barely tapped but it's not an easy business, particularly if you want to do something new and risky. The strategy of sticking to IP that people are already into is a sensible way to justify dev costs and derisk.
The thing is, nobody is playing Pokémon GO as an AR game, they're playing it simply as a GPS/location game. The AR features actually slow down the gameplay, so everybody turns them off immediately.
Still a thing – sure. But the company's valuation, hiring and forecasts were all done when everyone was playing Pokemon Go. That's obviously not the reality today.
The fan base is very loyal to the Pokemon brand and it really feels Pokemon Go is successful despite all of Niantic's shenanigans.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongo/comments/13lfd1c/its_offi...