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The Tragedy of Pokémon Go: What it takes for good ideas to attract money

theatlantic.com

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Re: The Tragedy of Pokémon Go: What it takes for good ideas to attract money

#11

Post by wyager »

jimmywanger wrote: post #7
russellbeattie wrote: post #2

Well, from what I've seen, there would have been no other way for this app to be successful without piggybacking on the success of another company's obsessive fans. No other customer would put up with a game that is so badly made. From a developer's perspective, this app is a true disaster, with an amazing level of incompetence that permeates the entire launch. First, the servers have been going up and down like a yo…

This is a reskinned Ingress, with simpler game mechanics. Log the damn errors and make sure it doesn't happen again? Have you written software? That is the most simplistic advice in the world. By your thoughts, all software should have been updated in a few days to be bug free. Had an update from the App Store? You realize that is gated by Apple and that you have to submit the update and wait an indeterminate amount…

There's a difference between bug-free and tolerable.

Re: The Tragedy of Pokémon Go: What it takes for good ideas to attract money

#13

Post by AznHisoka »

n0us wrote: post #9
onewaystreet wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GO has teams (Red, Blue, Yellow). You need to get to level 5 to join a team. Once you join a team you can battle at and take over gyms.

Well that answers it. If I can get the app to work long enough to reach level 5 I'll try that. It's a good thing they decided not to include that information from the start. They wouldn't want people to think there might actually be something fun to do.

Their Onboarding is horrendous. It took me awhile to figure out how to actually capture a Pokemon.

Re: The Tragedy of Pokémon Go: What it takes for good ideas to attract money

#14

Post by jimmywanger »

randartie wrote: post #10
jimmywanger wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a reskinned Ingress, with simpler game mechanics. Log the damn errors and make sure it doesn't happen again? Have you written software? That is the most simplistic advice in the world. By your thoughts, all software should have been updated in a few days to be bug free. Had an update from the App Store? You realize that is gated by Apple and that you have to submit the update and wait an indeterminate amount…

> By your thoughts, all software should have been updated in a few days to be bug free. Anyone who has used this app knows it is extremely crashy. It's not supposed to be bug-free, but releasing an app this crashy is fairly sloppy.

Not arguing with the bugginess or not bugginess.

But arguing with "just log it and fix it" is like saying to a plumber "just find the leak and fix it".

It's insulting to both the developer and the plumber.

Re: The Tragedy of Pokémon Go: What it takes for good ideas to attract money

#15

Post by stanmancan »

jimmywanger wrote: post #7
russellbeattie wrote: post #2

Well, from what I've seen, there would have been no other way for this app to be successful without piggybacking on the success of another company's obsessive fans. No other customer would put up with a game that is so badly made. From a developer's perspective, this app is a true disaster, with an amazing level of incompetence that permeates the entire launch. First, the servers have been going up and down like a yo…

This is a reskinned Ingress, with simpler game mechanics. Log the damn errors and make sure it doesn't happen again? Have you written software? That is the most simplistic advice in the world. By your thoughts, all software should have been updated in a few days to be bug free. Had an update from the App Store? You realize that is gated by Apple and that you have to submit the update and wait an indeterminate amount…

I couldn't agree with this anymore. I'm personally getting tired of reading all the armchair critics on HN bashing the game itself. Here are articles popping up saying in under a week it has more installs than Tinder and is about to surpass Twitter in daily active users. Twitter has had 10 years to learn how to handle this much traffic, the Pokemon Go developers haven't even had 10 days.

Look, it's a new app. There's going to be issues with it. There's going to be missing features that everybody wants. Does that mean they did a shitty job? No, not at all. I get that releasing a buggy app is far from ideal, but does anyone here actually know what they're going through? What constraints they had? What their budget was? No, no we don't. So who are we to sit here on a form and put down something that our fellow developers have built? To talk about how much better we would have done it?

I don't have the game yet, but my wife does, and it's been a ton of fun. We walked around our quiet little neighbourhood the other night. We both honestly figured we'd be the only people playing. Then we saw a mother and her son sitting on a bench at a corner defending their gym. Not 50 meters down the road an elderly couple, easily in their 70's asked us what team we were on, and playfully gave us crap since we were yellow and they were blue! In the end, we walked around for an hour and saw at least 20 different people or groups playing. Everyone with smiles on their faces. Everyone being friendly, outgoing, and talking to strangers. How can you consider this game anything but a huge success?

Re: The Tragedy of Pokémon Go: What it takes for good ideas to attract money

#16

Post by Fajita_Mane »

jimmywanger wrote: post #7
russellbeattie wrote: post #2

Well, from what I've seen, there would have been no other way for this app to be successful without piggybacking on the success of another company's obsessive fans. No other customer would put up with a game that is so badly made. From a developer's perspective, this app is a true disaster, with an amazing level of incompetence that permeates the entire launch. First, the servers have been going up and down like a yo…

This is a reskinned Ingress, with simpler game mechanics. Log the damn errors and make sure it doesn't happen again? Have you written software? That is the most simplistic advice in the world. By your thoughts, all software should have been updated in a few days to be bug free. Had an update from the App Store? You realize that is gated by Apple and that you have to submit the update and wait an indeterminate amount…

> Have you written software? That is the most simplistic advice in the world. I think the above poster was using hyperbolic language to make their point. Niantic was founded by engineers from Google. It seems a bit ridiculous that with all the expertise and funding they have, they couldn't even provide a stable backend architecture. It's not that difficult to scale an api using Google's app engine or aws.

>No caching? How would you cache game state when at any time the board state can change without warning, due to the actions of another player? And cached game state would invalidate your game actions, which would cause inconsistencies. The app could at least cache some of the info of your pokemon as well as the locations of nearby stops and gyms. Then only the status of those gyms and nearby pokemon would need to be synchronized when you reopen it.

Re: The Tragedy of Pokémon Go: What it takes for good ideas to attract money

#17

Post by dleslie »

jimmywanger wrote: post #7
russellbeattie wrote: post #2

Well, from what I've seen, there would have been no other way for this app to be successful without piggybacking on the success of another company's obsessive fans. No other customer would put up with a game that is so badly made. From a developer's perspective, this app is a true disaster, with an amazing level of incompetence that permeates the entire launch. First, the servers have been going up and down like a yo…

This is a reskinned Ingress, with simpler game mechanics. Log the damn errors and make sure it doesn't happen again? Have you written software? That is the most simplistic advice in the world. By your thoughts, all software should have been updated in a few days to be bug free. Had an update from the App Store? You realize that is gated by Apple and that you have to submit the update and wait an indeterminate amount…

Start with their choice to use Unity. It's a nightmare for its memory consumption and wasted CPU cycles. It is utterly unsuitable for an app that is concerned with battery life.

I say this as an individual who has made something of a career out of fixing/polishing mobile Unity apps from utterly unshippable garbage to decent products. More than a few have called for significant native code accessed via the FFI, because Unity just can't cut it.

I would recommend not using Unity at all, but that would mean losing out on the cheap labour pouring out of the dime-a-dozen game development schools.

Re: The Tragedy of Pokémon Go: What it takes for good ideas to attract money

#18

Post by elevensies »

jimmywanger wrote: post #7
russellbeattie wrote: post #2

Well, from what I've seen, there would have been no other way for this app to be successful without piggybacking on the success of another company's obsessive fans. No other customer would put up with a game that is so badly made. From a developer's perspective, this app is a true disaster, with an amazing level of incompetence that permeates the entire launch. First, the servers have been going up and down like a yo…

This is a reskinned Ingress, with simpler game mechanics. Log the damn errors and make sure it doesn't happen again? Have you written software? That is the most simplistic advice in the world. By your thoughts, all software should have been updated in a few days to be bug free. Had an update from the App Store? You realize that is gated by Apple and that you have to submit the update and wait an indeterminate amount…

Not that the comment you answered wasn't facile, but:

- buggy unreliable code is inevitable, but it shouldn't bring down the whole app. It isn't often that I see mobile apps crash to OS. There should be a finite number of things that can cause it.

- The are well know strategies to cache data that may change over time, this is true for all caches, if it can't change over time it isn't even really a cache, its just a static asset.

Re: The Tragedy of Pokémon Go: What it takes for good ideas to attract money

#19

Post by lazzlazzlazz »

jimmywanger wrote: post #7
russellbeattie wrote: post #2

Well, from what I've seen, there would have been no other way for this app to be successful without piggybacking on the success of another company's obsessive fans. No other customer would put up with a game that is so badly made. From a developer's perspective, this app is a true disaster, with an amazing level of incompetence that permeates the entire launch. First, the servers have been going up and down like a yo…

This is a reskinned Ingress, with simpler game mechanics. Log the damn errors and make sure it doesn't happen again? Have you written software? That is the most simplistic advice in the world. By your thoughts, all software should have been updated in a few days to be bug free. Had an update from the App Store? You realize that is gated by Apple and that you have to submit the update and wait an indeterminate amount…

They could cache the images of frequent, nearby poke stops and gyms, which likely a huge portion of the data for any sync.

Re: The Tragedy of Pokémon Go: What it takes for good ideas to attract money

#20

Post by manachar »

AznHisoka wrote: post #13
n0us wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that answers it. If I can get the app to work long enough to reach level 5 I'll try that. It's a good thing they decided not to include that information from the start. They wouldn't want people to think there might actually be something fun to do.

Their Onboarding is horrendous. It took me awhile to figure out how to actually capture a Pokemon.

The onboarding is surprisingly bad, so bad, I wonder if it was intentional. It sort of forces you to get social to compare notes on how to make things work. Most of what I've learned so far has come from either trial & error or from social sources (in meatspace and cyberspace).
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