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Pokémon GO: The Data Behind America’s Latest Obsession

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Re: Pokémon GO: The Data Behind America’s Latest Obsession

#281

Post by Ntrails »

vidarh wrote: post #190
donkeyd wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to live by the same principles, viewing in-app-purchases as something that's always bad. I have now, though, decided that I will decide what value a game has to me and will probably spend that amount on in-app-purchases. If the game has purchases that I think are worth it though. In Pokemon Go i haven't found them worth it yet, but that may come later. Also, I think a game shouldn't impose too many boundaries…

> Also, I think a game shouldn't impose too many boundaries when not buying anything in-game This is the big problem the way I see it. Done badly, in game purchases become cheats, and I don't want to spend money on cheats. Not for any moral reasons, but because it's no fun. In game purchases that don't serve as cheats is another matter. E.g. as you mention speeding up something where the only difference would be that…

I disagree, I'm all for buying cosmetics etc (praise gaben) to support a game. But I fundamentally am not going to spend money to skip over an artificial timesink that only exists to get you to spend money to speed it up. That's not content, it's a joke.

The idea of the two suggested actions being "spend more money or close the game and wait 2 hours" should be indicative of how they view the player. I'm perfectly happy to just close the thing and go play something else.

Re: Pokémon GO: The Data Behind America’s Latest Obsession

#282

Post by jpreiland »

nemo44x wrote: post #224
donkeyd wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to live by the same principles, viewing in-app-purchases as something that's always bad. I have now, though, decided that I will decide what value a game has to me and will probably spend that amount on in-app-purchases. If the game has purchases that I think are worth it though. In Pokemon Go i haven't found them worth it yet, but that may come later. Also, I think a game shouldn't impose too many boundaries…

> In Pokemon Go i haven't found them worth it yet, but that may come later. It's not a requirement but I highly recommend to people to buy some "Lucky Eggs (2X XP for 30 minutes) and extra "Incense" (attract more Pokemon for 30 minutes) and use them together in the early game. The reason why is that you get 2X the experience for discovering a new Pokemon which you will do a lot of early on. By doubling that further y…

also, save up a bunch of Pokemon ready to evolve (such as the ever plentiful Pidgey) and do them all at once with a Lucky Egg. 500 xp per evolution turns to 1000, making leveling pretty fast. The last few days I've been saving all of my stuff until the end of the day to evolve and easily pick up 12k+ xp

it's tempting to evolve everything as soon as you can, but waiting to do batch evolutions with double xp is much more effective

Re: Pokémon GO: The Data Behind America’s Latest Obsession

#283

Post by snuxoll »

madeofpalk wrote: post #185
merb wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will never buy any in App Coin, but I have a lot of consoles + games from nintendo. Even the 'New 3DS'.

Pokemon Go has a really interesting mechanic for this - one of the in app purchases you can buy is for a 'Lure' that you can place in your physical area (in game) that attracts Pokemon for all people in the area. So not only are you helping yourself, you're helping others around you. In our office, we take turns on placing them to help everyone out.

Something most people don't know either, you get 10 coins a day for each gym you have a Pokemon set up to defend (up to a maximum of 10 gyms) - giving you up to 100 free coins every day for just playing the game. And since you can't buy anything that you can't just get from a Pokestop either (and they are pretty common even in my suburban area, there's three on the ~15 minute walk to the convenience store down the street) there's little reason to spend money unless you are sitting in your house all day playing instead of actually walking around (which is by design).

Really, the biggest complaint I can see about the game from an IAP standpoint is rural areas get pretty hosed because Ingress (where all of the AR content came from) didn't have many portals in these areas, so there's a lack of gyms and pokestops to actually use for people living there. Hopefully Niantic makes some improvement here, because while Ingress was a game focused on urban exploration and it made sense for that title Pokemon is supposed to be a much more accessible franchise.

Re: Pokémon GO: The Data Behind America’s Latest Obsession

#284

Post by samfisher83 »

NamTaf wrote: post #88

If Google had any sense, they would be throwing a tonne more at this. It may be Ingress with less features and a Pokemon skin but that latter part is exactly the mainstream appeal they need to make AR big. This is their big chance to create a new market. If they sort out the bugginess and roll out decent features in the next couple of months to keep retention, they're onto something big. At near-on midnight on Saturd…

I think Pokemon has more to do with success of it than the AR stuff. I see most people playing without AR on. Pokemon appeals to the nostalgia factor. A lot of us grew with these games when we were kids. Now most of us older, but we still grew with them. It also hits the kids demo as well. Pokemon is/was a good game. Its like why marvel and transformers and all these 80s/90s cartoons are doing so well.

Re: Pokémon GO: The Data Behind America’s Latest Obsession

#285

Post by xiaoma »

donkeyd wrote: post #151
Sephiroth87 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically Nintendo is not even the full owner of Pokemon, that would be The Pokemon Company [1], which is only partially owned by Nintendo [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pokémon_Company

Yet Nintendo market cap gained 7 billion on Pokemon Go alone. I wonder if these investors really have no idea that the tech behind the game is Niantic and that Pokemon isn't even completely owned by Nintendo, or that there's something I'm missing here.

Nintendo has never been about the tech. Not the NES, not when Sega released the Genesis while they pushed SMB3 for their "wimpy" 8-bit system, not when they crushed both Sony ans MS with the underpowered original Wii and not now.

Sony will live or die based on their ability to make great tech. Nintendo is different.

Re: Pokémon GO: The Data Behind America’s Latest Obsession

#286

Post by tdaltonc »

malchow wrote: post #271

It's difficult to escape the feeling that Nintendo is not exactly central to the success of Pokémon Go, and that the 7BB increase in market cap is. . . excessive. Fact is, this game is the work of a small VC-backed game shop in San Francisco with some great talent. They license the Pokémon characters, which are owned by The Pokémon Company, which is minority owned by Nintendo.

Nintendo is also an investor in Niantic Labs. If you think the price is high, you're welcome to short it.

Re: Pokémon GO: The Data Behind America’s Latest Obsession

#287

Post by snuxoll »

FungalRaincloud wrote: post #216
viraptor wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This game is targeting young kids, so I'm not sure there will ever be any person-identifying interaction. A lot of online multiplayer games for kids don't have interactions beyond friending/favouriting someone. P-GO would be a prime candidate for 4chan type people and you can imagine how that would work together with location spoofing and global playground. I expect that Nintendo & Niantic know this (Ingress never so…

If the game is targeting young kids, it's missing out on its primary audience. For one thing, young kids often do not have cellphones of their own. But for another, I was recently at a mall in a fairly major city, and I did not see one person under 18 playing, but near every Pokestop, and every lower spawn rate Pokemon, I found dozens of people. Pokemon games have had somewhat adult humor and themes for years, though…

Nintendo has always been very reluctant to include social features within games beyond a very difficult to use friend list, hell, they removed SwapNote from the 3DS because it young players were getting inappropriate notes sent to them. Frankly, I'm surprised they haven't binned Miiverse some days, but they do an excellent job at moderating it.

I wouldn't expect Ingress-style open comms, but it would be nice to at least be able to message other players on a friend list.

Re: Pokémon GO: The Data Behind America’s Latest Obsession

#288

Post by was_boring »

LukeShu wrote: post #273
Larrikin wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be one of the worst possible outcomes of Nintendo dipping their toes into the mobile game category. Nintendo doesn't need to bootstrap, they don't need to mine user data, they are brimming with IP and are backed by a lot of creative people. My hope is after this initial success they start adding in paid apps that tie into improve their existing games. Something like exploring the real world for Pokemon all…

Read the parent post again, they aren't suggesting that they put ads on the screen of your phone.

Exactly. The rare item placement could be sold to the highest bidder, without any actual advertising in game. It's everything foursquare tried to do -- drive foot traffic.

Can you imagine driving down the road, your family is starving, you just want something quick to eat. You ask your kids what they want to eat, and they say Burger King, because that's where mew is that week? Kids have a lot of control on this stuff, and the retail space knows it.

In addition, they can also tap into mellineals who grew up on Pokémon.

Re: Pokémon GO: The Data Behind America’s Latest Obsession

#289

Post by makomk »

yoodenvranx wrote: post #102
NamTaf wrote: post #88

If Google had any sense, they would be throwing a tonne more at this. It may be Ingress with less features and a Pokemon skin but that latter part is exactly the mainstream appeal they need to make AR big. This is their big chance to create a new market. If they sort out the bugginess and roll out decent features in the next couple of months to keep retention, they're onto something big. At near-on midnight on Saturd…

The one thing which is missing (and which made Ingress the amazing game it is) is ingame notification and ingame player activity. Based on the gym activity there are at least 15-20 players in my town but there is just no way of contacting them. If I am lucky I can manage to meet one by random chance but currently Pokemon Go is a rather single player game. The other thing which is missing is a system which shows ingam…

The ingame player activity feature in Ingress turned out to have some really nasty privacy implications. I doubt they'd want to repeat it.
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