[0] Purely anecdotal, but based on multiple contacts already getting bored enough to uninstall

I realized Pokemon Go was just a "background activity" for hanging out with friends... and I'd rather focus on the people.

I'll jump back in as soon as they added trading and player vs player.

It is completely devoid of skill and rewards only having a higher level. The game isn't even pay-to-win or skill-to-win.

It's win-to-win-to-win.

If a person knows anything about the mechanics of the game they know casual players (and most adults) are simply not able to compete with lvl 25 school kids who can devote 6+ hrs a day to this game.

I'd rather play games where I can beat opponents with skill, not grinding.

If nothing else, Niantic learned from Ingress. High level players have high level stuff, sure. But 6 v 1 ensures even the most casual player can make progress. You don't have that level bonus wall to climb that you have in other games.

I live in a city centre, and there are families walking past all day, with kids looking at phones. And plenty of kids walking alone or in groups.

If any city counts pedestrians, or would be interesting to see what difference Pokémon has caused.

That basically describes every roguelike and JRPG ever. At best they provide a tediously complicated skill tree or bizarre counter structure that gives you some trivia to explore and memorize to provide an illusion of skill, but fundamentally a massive chunk of modern gaming is "kill stuff, increment power"

If anything, WoW's big problem is that an average new player starting out is faced with 12 years worth of content they have to rush through to get to max level endgame, where the vast majority of in-game social life occurs. The innate incentives of experiencing the storyline and zones doesn't compete favorably with the huge social incentive of wanting to join your friends at endgame as quickly as possible.

In WoW, just any zone-leveled game, old content quickly becomes obsolete once it's superseded with newer content, and only delivers a fraction of its original value.

Pokemon GO doesn't have this problem (for the simple reason of tying their in-game geography to real-world geography), but also has a very shallow gameplay where the novelty will wear off quickly. If they can expand gameplay mechanics quickly before players abandon it, they may have a sustained hit.

urm, tanks can solo the 5 man dungeons, so it doesnt really matter what the rest of the group does anymore...

Maybe you meant MMORPGs and JRPGs? Because MMORPGs tend to fit to that template.

The problem now is that holding gyms is impossible. I can never have more than 1 because the time it takes to drive to the nearest gym and capture it is less than the time it takes for somebody else to retake a gym.

I don't think the creators of the game envisioned that kind of dedication, though. And you're right, that is a fundamental difference between Pokemon GO (which despite the claims of its older players, is definitely targeted at teens and children) and Ingress.

Don't underestimate anybody. There are 40-olds working full-time who can devote 6+ hrs a day to games.

The only limiting factor for taking down gyms for me is the number of potions I have. I usually only fight with half dead monsters so I can use revives instead, then I use potions for the one that I put in as a defender to conserve potions.

I am also at level 23 and can take out pretty much any gym. But right when I walk out of range, someone half my level using either a full six roster or type advantage or both will boot me out. When the game came out I could maybe stay in control of a gym for a day but now it has not exceeded half an hour so I no longer try.

I think this is a nice change from ingress, where there was very little a low level player could do about a high level portal.

I wouldn't underestimate the value of a game mechanic for getting people to hang out. Many board games are basically just background activities, but there an excuse to get together.

That said, if it is a background activity, it should be a background-able app -- i.e. notify me when certain Pokemon are close but otherwise leave me alone. I find it much less exhausting to have an app that requires my attention for only 15 minutes a day.

The scary thing is, iBeacon handler don't have to do the cute "hey you're in this store, click to open the app!" sort of thing. They can run completely in the background, just reporting "hey boss, they're in the shoe section of Store #3313 now! Now they're in the produce section! Now they're gone." And, as far as I know, there's no way to turn off the tracking behaviour while keeping the helpful "activation suggestion" behaviour.

I have no idea what APIs they use, so I'm not sure how hard it is to get this information, but it is at least possible.

https://github.com/transistorsoft/cordova-background-geoloca...

https://github.com/transistorsoft/react-native-background-ge...

Here I am driving around Iceland with my sample app, completely in background. Tracking engages automatically when device is detected to be moving.

http://www.transistorsoft.com/lab/iceland

It is fairly clear that there are no such heuristics in PoGo.

The reality is, Niantic is a small company, and does not have the resources to throw at detecting/banning/dealing with the appeals.

There's something to that. I pass many players daily on my way to work, and I see them more often in groups (usually friends, sometimes couples) than alone. I've read somewhere recently that it's also turning into a way to ask someone out / handle a date, and personally I know one girl I could easily ask out by suggesting we go Pokemon hunting...

Of course gym battles are a lot more simple and fixing the many issues both combat-wise and in general take priority compared to adding such mechanics in.

It's not an issue, LTE is fast enough. For multiplayer we take into account every bullet and sync dozens of players in real time.

Level 20 is sort of the "soft max". beyond that it's very expensive to progress further. It's 210,000 total XP for level 20. 435,000 total for level 23.

Realistically, say 4 hours of catching at those lured sites buys you enough for the 60 evolutions, 60,000 xp. Let's go with 5 hours total.

Perfect conditions, i think that comes out to 35 hours. I'd say double or perhaps triple that realistically. You have to go gather loot and stuff, which still grants XP, just at a slower rate. If the OP felt like it, running the whole time with lucky eggs would cut that down quite a bit, maybe half, and cost perhaps $20. I'm guessing around 80 hours without buying anything.

A single person who's interested in it can pretty easily come up with 3 hours a day, and quite a few hours on the weekend. 30 hours seems pretty accessible. it's been out for 2 weeks or so now, so the OP is only a little on the high side. Perhaps not at all if they'd spent money on eggs.

Of course, different people have different commitments. In a rural area, this would be impossible. Family, hobbies, a long commute would drastically reduce the time available. But if your hobby is video games, it's pretty easy to swap one for another with little effort.

also i bet most of what everyone read about this game at first was paid for; people downloaded based on those initial false articles, see the bugs, uninstall, or even play like you did and gave up when you notice the pay to win scheme. but regardless, the app already made it to the download top lists and now they're even getting real news coverage everywhere.

this has nothing to do with people wanting Nintendo games on mobile. it's just a forced marketing fad like any other we always had since the 80s.

Then again, I imagine it's a lot easier to pull prior users back than it is to find new ones, so in that respect, they're already ahead of everyone.

Does it? My impression is that there's a lot more people playing Pokemon Go than there are Pokemon fans. The IP no doubt helped, but I don't think that you can just release any Nintendo IP on mobile and instantly have the massive virality success of Pokemon Go. There's something more to it than that.

But, I'm catching pokemon on my walk to/from work (makes it less boring, and doesn't make it take any longer). My wife is now dragging me to the park every other day to run around in circles catching pokemon.

I'd be interested to see some survey results on what percentage of people playing this are actually pokemon fans.

Hell, it hasn't even released in Japan yet.

We're not dealing with people sitting and staring at a screen anymore. The game changes with the weather.

True, but how long does it take to actually catch'em all? Because I've been playing for 10 days, at maybe 1-2 hours per day on average, I've caught 46 out of 151 pokémon, and it gradually gets harder and harder to catch new ones due to their different rarities. This means that it might take (me) 100-200 hours to catch'em all, which is not bad for a game and especially for a mobile game.

And then, they have 5 more generations of Pokémon that they can add, to a total of 746. Plus trading, direct PvP, etc.

The challenge is to fix the server issues, crashes and problems like the 3-step bug before too many users get annoyed and leave. But if they do that, I think their playerbase can last quite long.

If they ever get trading working it would be a lot easier to fill out the last few holes in the roster.

The question isn't whether Pokemon Go will keep my interest. I'm not a typical mobile game consumer, and most of us here probably aren't. I think the core compulsion loop is a little bit thin without quite enough variety or randomness, but I'm not confident enough to make predictions.

Also, bus is a perfect venue to play the game. Personally, half of my game activity is logged on a tram.

When I accidentally get stuck on a bus in rush our, Pokémon Go makes that much more tolerable---if the servers aren't having rush hour trouble.

I don't think the games flaw is making people walk around. That's what makes it unique plus the AR part. I think the flaw with Pokemon Go is trying to keep people interested, just like every other game.

Plus, the game is constantly crashing, draining battery, crashing again when the network goes down. It's been almost 3 weeks and they don't have fixed a single bug, and it's not like they're hard to reproduce or complex to understand where they come from. They literally didn't test their code before pushing it to the outside. It's not "Hard to scale" when you don't do things like "no caching client side", "mutate states concurrently without write ack". Come on, man.

An 11 year old kid can't go out at night and catch Pokemon on their own, but they sure as heck can sit at home playing games.

I'm an old man but I do most of my game playing from bed at night and in the morning (terrible habit I know) and so does my wife. I'd love to be able to add Pokemon to my daily games rotation but right now I can't.

But getting the same 11yo to spend his weekends in the park instead of on the couch .. that’s a turning point we’ve been missing for years.

Over the span of my youth (I'm 34, so consider this 80s-90s) I lived the transition from building forts in the woods and rafts on the rivers (never went well, never stopped us trying) to arguing over who's turn it was on the playstation.

Now I read articles about "free-range children" and parents getting in trouble for even letting them walk to school, and .. I realise I'm biased by my inputs (no-one writes articles saying "hey, nothing's changed"), but it seems like this is a different era. And damnit, I'm not old enough to call things eras yet.

But it does seem the 'mobile' has been missing in 'mobile gaming'. We've built an entire industry on "always available gaming" or "something to stare at on the subway gaming", but it's taken 34yo men playing what's basically an easter-egg hunt, to remind us what 'mobile' actually means.

I think most kids still intrinsically like the outdoors-- there is a lot of cool stuff out there.

This an extremely short-sighted comment. The developers created a digital world they can modify at will. They can add any number of items to collect, add mini games within the game, create new quests, etc. The possibilities are literally endless.

Yeah, but no one plays games for possibilities. Will Niantic actually be able to deliver fast enough?

As things stand, the statement "there isn't much to do once you've caught them all" is pretty on point, not short-sighted.

You mean actually make it a pokemon game?

That's crazy talk.

(and I want to train up my team too)

    1) You can walk around in immersive play
    2) There's opportunity for face to face interaction. 
    3) It's IP that a large part of the public cares about. 

Don't know much about Ingress but didn't it have #1 and #2 already..?

Similarly, I used to live in San Francisco and my team recently hit 54 winning septicycles in a row -- that's over a year of weekly victories. While we're good players, we're not that good. It's problematic if one team can establish that degree of dominance in one of the most tech-oriented cities in the world.

(Brooklyn had a similar streak the other way.)

And since Ingress never monetized in the top couple of hundred apps, there's no way it is/was profitable.

However if it were absent all AR/VR immersion aspects, it wouldn't be nearly as big either, just another Pokemon game. Maybe the critical part is the combination of #1 and #3?

It's enough. There's just enough AR to facilitate the game of "let's pretend." You could've also have said that there's barely any 3D in Eve Online fleet combat. Advanced players would zoom out all the way, set graphics to minimum, and play entirely with the "Overview" table. (Hence Excel Spreadsheet In Spaaaace!) Yet no one would say that Eve Online isn't a 3D video game world. It's enough to have something that frames the real world as a fantasy world come to life, and let you walk around in it. That's the key: The effect on the user. Not how primitive or slick the technology is.

Heck, you know what the Asteroids screen looks like. That was enough to give people the feeling of piloting a combat spaceship. Yet it's really nothing like actual outer space at all. Granted this stuff will get better, but it's good to note how the most primitive mechanics make people feel. Then take that knowledge of the essence of the experience into the future with slicker AR graphics.

That said, I think I get most of the "virtual/real reality mixing" feeling from the geographical aspect. In Ingress, I quickly started to feel as if the portals were a real, but invisible, part of my city. I'm starting to get something like it with Pokéstops. The important thing here seems to be persistence and non-randomness of that particular game world aspect.

Same as with the game's predecessor, Ingress - that had no "camera overlay" elements at all, but it's pretty universally described as an AR game.

I do think that we will be seeing a lot more AR in the future as a result of this.