Niantic, Maker of Hit ‘Pokémon Go’ App, Refuels with $3.9B Valuation
wsj.comI firmly believe that had Niantic been allowed to mimic the traditional Pokemon PvP, it would have been an even greater success.
The core gameplay of the Nintendo games wasn't terribly complex, but had tons of replayability.
I think a big flaw of Pokemon Go was how different the experience was for urban folks and the rural folks. While the former were running between Charizards and Blastoises, the latter were enjoying their very rare Pidgey and Rattata spawns.
As someone who grew up in an extremely rural area, I sympathize with those who didn't get to experience the full Pokemon Go launch, it was pretty amazing to partake in. Seeing hundreds of people out for night walks, hearing someone shout "There's one down here!" at the other end of the park, running in crowds with strangers to get in on a capture, it was a lot of fun while it the initial surge lasted. The magic burnt out pretty quick for me, but I do still see people playing the game at least a few times a week.
As someone who left that rural background and now lives in a smaller, but proper city, my response is a lot colder and less sympathetic. Living rurally is a trade off. Cheaper land and housing, more space, less culture, fewer people, and less socialization. The internet _helps_ but it doesn't _cure_ this issue. Until we have teleportation living rurally will always be more isolating.
It's not really surprising that a walking-based game with a social streak that seeks to have 10 to 30 interactions per user per hour (pokes to catch, teams to form, battles to fight, etc) wouldn't work well in areas of the world where there aren't even 10 to 30 _people_ per square mile.
> Until we have teleportation living rurally will always be more isolating.
I am very curious how close VR with gaze and body language tracking will get us.
What do you mean by "allowed"?
From what I understand, their contract with Nintendo (or whoever) explicitly dissolve disallowed it.
That’s an odd assertion, given PvP battles are now live.
Do you have anything to back it up?
My understanding was that they just have a small team and aren’t very good (ie. brave enough) at making changes beyond ‘text fixes’
He's saying traditional as in a turn based strategy game like the core series (like Red and Blue). Many of the long time fans were turned away by lack of strategy.
Not only was the button mashing (and lag) extremely offputting, the worst feeling in the world was beating a level 6 gym by yourself and then someone puts their pokemon in before yours.
I rage uninstalled pokemon go after that and my data bill has been rational ever since :)
They added (limited) PvP to Pokemon Go yesterday.
if they had added turn-based PVP with an AR overlay for other viewers to 'watch' on their phone, with crazy effects and real life sized pokemon,,,,, would have been a HUGE hit with initial snowball of people flocking to that app.
I would bet on the Harry Potter game being a relative flop. The Japanese market will probably be dead and that accounted for a huge proportion of Pokémon Go’s revenue. I would also doubt that many “whales” would be immediately attracted to the premise. They will have a tough time not just being Pokémon go but with Harry Potter this time, and I bet that will hurt mainstream adoption.
Japan... not like Harry Potter? I'm guessing you've not been to Universal Studios in Japan!
Of course, that's anecdotal evidence. Here's an article about Fantastic Beasts ticket sales: https://deadline.com/2016/11/fantastic-beasts-moana-doctor-s...
For Fantastic Beasts 2: https://deadline.com/2018/11/venom-crosses-800-million-ralph...
The latter article states:
> it held the No. 1 position in 37 markets this session. Japan, a typically important hub for the Wizarding World, opened to $13M (including $1M on 31 IMAX screens) for WB’s biggest start of 2018 and similar to FB1.
I am surprised by this, but still skeptical. Pikachu almost certainly must be an order of magnitude more popular than Harry Potter, no?
Somehow I don't expect HP to be very successful project as well, but the reasoning seems off to me. If anything, Japanese market is more open to new HP franchise products than the others. But I don't think it was actually the Pokemon that made the game successful, it was the mere fact of neutral, yet well-known setting in combination with a relatively novel gameplay. Ingress attracted attention as it was, but lacked the familiar name. But essentially Pokemon Go is the same thing as Ingress, and HP will probably be too. It doesn't seem to be as attractive as that combination of novelty and nostalgia of Pokemon Go 5 years ago.
This isn't even remotely a reason for why the game should fail of course, merely absence of an obvious reason for it to succeed. But IMO: while having absolutely huge potential to be great, neither Ingress nor Pokemon Go turned out to be a particularly good game. Maybe HP will be different, but for now I stand by the opinion that Niantic actually isn't a great game-making company.
HP is as big... if not bigger in a lot of countries than it is in the USA.
Potter is dead. It was a franchise pegged to a particular generation. The original author consciously upped the aged of the books to match the age of the fans. The movies did the same. Potter fans have now grown up. They don't relate to the material as they did as kids. They find the early material childish, silly. Marketing potter to them again is very difficult.
Similar franchises (star wars/trek etc) did not attempt to 'grow up' alongside fans. So, decades later, they can still be relevant to new people. Star Wars VIII isn't attempting to be any more mature than Star Wars IV. But compare potter's first and latest movies. They are aiming at totally different age groups.
I fail to see how the first Harry Potter is less relevant to the ten-year olds today, than it was to the ten-year olds 20 years ago.
Somehow you're simultaneously complaining that the Potter series offers something for the older fans, and that the Potter series is too childish?
They are still making movies in the potter universe. The current one has grossed 150 million in a month. I bet universal studios and Harry Potter legos aren’t doing too bad either.
Anecdotal, but I'm a mid 20s person living in the US and the harry potter fandom is still very strong.
I don't think Star Trek isn't a similar franchise. It's not centered around a single storyline like Star Wars or Harry Potter.
Star Wars is a similar franchise, but I think it shows the opposite, because the fandom was strong during the 16 year gap between movies from 1983 to 1999, which shows that once successful, a fandom like that will stay intact for years, whether or not anything new gets added to it. Harry Potter fans can ignore the new stuff that's coming out. A lot of Star Wars fans disliked or didn't pay much attention to the new movies but remained part of the fandom.
I believe you could say the same thing for pokemon.
Expect that Pokemon has done the exact opposite: it deliberately has not upped the age of the target audience of the core product. Ash is still ten years old, after adventuring for 20 years. And he's still "relatively unexperienced". Time doesn't pass.
Pokemon has diversified the franchise selection though, there are now many goods (themed tableware etc.) aimed for more mature audience.
I've seen at least 3 or 4 posts to the tune of "I'm 23, and I just can't get into this latest Pokemon game. It's so easy, not like they used to be! Am I a bad person?"
If you value your karma score, on no account should you say anything like "It's OK, Pokemon is a game designed for children, and while that doesn't mean you must now make an angry face at it, growl, and loudly announce that you're too grown up for it now, it does mean that you're likely going to want to move on. Consider {GAME LIST} for similar more mature takes on the ideas."
In the meantime, my 8 and 10 year olds, while not necessarily mega-fans, are decently into it, and will probably be even more so when they actually get their hands on the games. System is working as designed.
The Pokemon games are very complex for games designed for children, as are games like Yokai Watch. The first game is probably one of the most complex 8-bit console RPGS, I'd think. But they really aren't children's games in the usual sense of being designed specifically for them into well into the later lifespan.
I think the later games make more concessions to them, but it feels more like it was just a normal rpg that somehow got big for kids due to ancillary merchandise, like trading card games and cartoons.
"The Pokemon games are very complex for games designed for children, as are games like Yokai Watch"
This is one of those "don't underestimate children" times. I was playing Ultima 4 at the age kids play Pokemon nowadays. But it's definitely designed for 10-14 year olds, and I wouldn't even be surprised a 14 year old not wearing nostalgia goggles would actually start to notice it's getting kinda easy.
A lot of that "complexity" is just fluff. Non-competitive Pokemon is still like most other (J)RPGs; ultimately, an answer to every problem (not the answer, but an answer) is to trade time for levels and just blast your way through the next boss. And time is what kids have at that age.
A systemic problem with the genre and the exponential-power-gain treadmill. There are solutions, like the Shin Megami Tensei approach of greatly raising the power of non-level-related elements, or the Disgaea approach of just embracing it and going nuts, and some other things (Elder Scrolls has tried a couple of solutions though I'm not in love with either of Oblivion's or Skyrim's attempts to solve this) but the exponential-power-gain approach is still pretty dominant.
Pokemon is inappropriate for children imho. The messages it sends, the capturing and fighting of animals, are not good. It is a modern incarnation of past hobbies (fighting insects) that today are totally unacceptable.
Many also criticize the potter franchise for similar reasons.
>There is also hope that Niantic’s pending game with a Harry Potter theme will also be popular when it comes out some time next year.
It will be interesting to see how successful this is, given that unlike Pokemon, Harry Potter isn't really a franchise defined by the location-based hunt-and-collect mechanic that drives Pokemon Go and Ingress.
I can't imagine it matters much since the core mechanic has proven to be so popular and it's really a squeeze of the IP tit.
I bet a Harry Potter skin will be even bigger than Pokemon Go. I'd wager most people are on no more than can-recognize-pikachu terms with the Pokemon franchise yet Pokemon Go was a cultural phenomenon.
Meanwhile most people I know have at least seen most Harry Potter movies. I know 30- and 40-somethings that have gone to Universal Studios' Harry Potter exhibit... dressed up. And the Harry Potter world has a particularly popular faction system (the Hogwarts houses).
Certainly curious to see if Niantic can pull it off again.
>I'd wager most people are on no more than can-recognize-pikachu terms with the Pokemon franchise yet Pokemon Go was a cultural phenomenon.
Umm... what? Pokemon was already a massive global cultural phenomenon before Niantic got it, an entire generation more or less grew up with the franchise. Hell, a lot of people were shocked Nintendo allowed an unknown company like Niantic anywhere near such a property.
The existing popularity of Pokemon is the reason Pokemon Go was so popular, not the other way around.
And Ingress got a massive boost due to being in XKCD. I doubt they'd've even gotten the chance to make Pokémon Go if it weren't for that.
Guided swish and flick magic at Universal Studios is a pretty popular mechanic. Maybe Niantic can sell wands like they sell smart pokeball keychains and watches currently. And with better AR, the magic effects could overlay onto real world landmarks, ie make the Eiffel tower disappear with a swish in AR mode.
Getting into magical duels with other players might be fun.
>>[...] given that unlike Pokemon, Harry Potter isn't really a franchise defined by the location-based hunt-and-collect mechanic that drives Pokemon Go and Ingress.
Pokémon itself wasn't location driven either before the launch of Pokémon Go.
The games, and I assume the anime, are about searching for pokemon in different locations.
You assume correctly about the anime. Then again, Harry Potter also turned into a quest to search for Voldemort's seven horcruxes, so it won't be much of a stretch to adapt Harry Potter to a location-based game.
From what I've seen of Pokemon games before Pokemon Go, it seems like the majority of the game is spent walking your character around a map to explore buildings and landscape features.
The two newest movies have had a very big "cool monsters"-streak to them. Not sure if they thought about making this game, when they were writing the scripts originally.
Demand is there. The new Smash Bros sold 1M+ units in three days ;)
Between Ingress, Pokémon Go and now Harry Potter, aren't they worried about fragmenting the landscape? There's only so much time an individual can spend on AR games; looking at how people moved between Ingress and Pokémon Go, I'd guess the limit is one popular game on the market, max two. Releasing more sounds like a way to selfpwn the entire business.
Pokemon had mass appeal. Ingress was always relatively niche and nerdy.
I wonder if they'll give any of that to OpenStreetMap.
This feels a bit like Rovio for me - Pogo was very very popular but they look in every way like the classic one and done. They haven’t put very many good mechanics into any game yet