231–240 of 250 posts
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It is fun when those common pokemon evolve into high CP Pokemon.
They don't though. Evolving gives you, in my experience, +100, perhaps +200 CP. All my 10-50CP Pidgeys don't magically get useful by evolving. Though they do give nice XP.
Note: still the top grossing app in the iOS App Store. As always, don't forget to put the scary raw numbers into context. 12 million out of 45 million means they've retained 73% of their user base month over month. We can't derive actual retention numbers from that because new users, etc. but 15% is great month over month retention for a F2P mobile game. Assume Pokemon Go is doing that. That would mean 6.5M of their…
In august the game became available in Thailand, a potential huge new user base. Perhaps the game opened up in other parts of the world as well. This could mean the percentage of users playing dropped by a much bigger amount in existing countries.
However, you make a good point -- the numbers lose even more context when they're not broken down by country, particularly when the launch was staggered. E.g., Pokemon Go launched in Japan on July 21st, which means any numbers captured at the beginning of August reflect initial launch volumes.
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While I mostly agree, I wouldn't say they are entirely a step backwards. Pokemon Go broke the mold and did something that would not really work on any past platform.
I have never played Pokemon Go, but i'm curious what mold it broke? Ingress was around a long time previously and as far as i've surmised contains essentially all the features of Go plus some more. What it lacked was the compelling and nostalgic branding that Pokemon has. Genuinely curious.
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Yep. I grew up with Pokemon and didn't even install Pokemon Go.. but if it had legit PvP battling and trading, I would definitely give it a spin. How cool would it be if you were walking down the street with your phone in your pocket.. and all of a sudden it started vibrating, you pick it up - TRAINER BATTLE. You look around, and you see someone else with their phone out looking around too. Now all of a sudden you're…
> So much potential for liability FTFY
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The Kinect is goddamn amazing. Using a system without a Kinect makes me feel like Scotty in Star Trek 4.
Eh.. Kinect GAMES are kinda weak... The most useful features of the kinect only need a mic to work, but of course MS wont let you just use a mic for those features... they want you to buy a ridiculously expensive gadget to collect dust while waiting for a voice command...
Controlling my tv with my hand needs a camera.
But yes, overall the Kinect games are not numerous - what does exist tho was, when good, really good.
Also Xbox Fitness would not work well at all without it - and that's fantastic
I am a semi-active Pokemon Go player in the SF Bay Area and I can tell it's definitely died down over the last few weeks. In the beginning, every Friday/Saturday/Sunday night, the whole downtown area would be lured up and people would be out mingling and catching pokemon in the local park. This past weekend, there were only a few lures and a few diehards milling around the park. There's a few dynamics at play based o…
Completely agree on #1. It's turned into just blindly walking around and hoping you run into something. My SO and I played this past weekend and saw a porygon on the "sightings" list. We covered as much ground as fast as we could but never actually saw it. Where's the fun in that? I'm still playing for now, but catching new things was one of my favorite things about the game and now it seems to be almost entirely bas…
But I agree completely that it's more fun when you have a map or the long lost footprints to be able to zero in on foot.
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> The GPS issues have nothing to do with getting a GPS fix. It's just a plain ol' bug. GPS on phones aren't that accurate, especially downtown, but most applications will filter the data because of that. Ever use Google Maps for directions and make a turn different from what the app is telling you to do? Your car icon will continue down the "correct" path for 15-30 seconds before re-adjusting to the new route. This a…
May be Niantic&co decided to disable google optimized gps location services to not give them such data?
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> By taking out the maps, Niantic has turned their scavenger hunt into a scratch-off lotto ticket ... they broke the effort-reward cycle You're phrasing this almost as if Niantic wanted there to be third-party mapping apps in the first place, and then changed its mind. The game Niantic released doesn't have mapping, and didn't intend to have an open API. This can be read as an implicit statement that the game design…
> but that probably means that you were not the audience Niantic designed (and playability-tested) the game for. And that's entirely the developer's fault, not the players'.
I mean, I see what you're saying in the "the customer is always right" sense—it's Niantic's problem to solve if the majority of people playing their game want something other than their game.
But suppose Niantic don't care about making billions of dollars from an audience of "everyone", but only intended the game to be interesting to, say, 8-to-14 year olds with lots of time to kill wandering around in their small towns not finding much of anything. I don't think it's valid to criticize Niantic that another audience glommed onto the game that isn't that audience, and then is demanding an experience Niantic didn't intend.
A comparison: there are these cartoons in Japan about little girls being cute. They are marketed to little girls, who are intended to identify with the characters. But for some reason, a lot of grown men watch these shows, although nobody ever marketed the show to them. As you might guess, the grown men want different things from the shows than the intended audience does. And the grown men have a lot more money. But that doesn't mean that the show should change, does it?
Also remember, Pokemon Go is a franchise license. It was likely intended, in part, as a loss-leader marketing experiment for Nintendo to revive the Pokemon brand. Franchise licensees, before anything else, have to serve as good ambassadors for their franchise. Even if that means not making money. To do otherwise is to possibly get your license revoked, and for these franchise-licensed works, the licensed IP is usually 99% of the reason people (both in and out of the intended audience) are paying any attention. Making Pokemon's intended audience want to buy more Pokemon games, isn't necessarily more important a concern to Niantic's businesspeople than making a billion dollars from IAPs is; but it is certainly a more life-or-death concern. It's something that can't be traded away even for great benefit, like regulatory-compliance in a bank, or safety concern in an engineering project.
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The breaking of the feature was seemingly a response to try and break maps to begin with - the data used in the footprints is what the mapping applications used (along with millions of accounts giving off false coordinates) to triangulate 'mon. The root motivation of the bug was the stressing of the servers by "headless" accounts that existed solely to make mapping software possible. It's unfortunate that they chose…
They removed footprints to reduce server load and increase stability. It had nothing to do with stopping mapping software.
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> there's likely already some sort of effort-reward cycle built into the game that doesn't involve mapping. You would think that, but there really isn't. It's easier to see if you load up the game for yourself. Sure, it's true that Niantic didn't plan or intend for usable maps to exist. But it's also true that the game is effectively unplayable without the maps. The real winner in this whole situation is Nintendo. Ni…
> The real winner in this whole situation is Nintendo. Niantic has effectively given their entire userbase over to Nintendo -- and even though Nintendo's doing very little to attract or keep them, they'll probably still get some extra 3DS + game sales as a result. I don't understand how that follows. How did Niantic give any of its userbase over to Nintendo? Pokemon Go does very little to advance the Nintendo games -…
Niantic's handling of Pokemon Go is driving demand for Pokemon, but not fulfilling it. And some of that unfulfilled demand is going to Nintendo, whose product does deliver a Pokemon experience, and is already sitting in thousands of stores all across America today.
"Sales of Pokémon X and Y, which were first released in October 2013, were up a huge 200 percent compared to their sales in July of last year." -- https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/18/nintendo-3ds-sales-up-80-y...
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> Pokemon Go does very little to advance the Nintendo games - there's literally zero upsell involved (or even any cross-advertising).
It doesn't have to advertise Nintendo's products, it only has to advertise the brand.
Coca-Cola ads drive demand and sales for Coke, even though they rarely upsell the actual product. Coke advertisements can drive sales without explicitly saying "12 packs are $3.99 at your local Wal*Mart".