Apple says Pokémon Go is the most downloaded app in its first week ever

Re:Apple says Pokémon Go is the most downloaded app in its f... by stcredzero on Friday July 22, 2016 @04:11PM (#12146420)

Pokémon Go is real genius in its combination of 3 elements that make it like lazing a stick of dynamite.

    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.

Of these, it's #1 that's the most critical. It's like the world is the world of Pokemon and you're a character in it like Ash.

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Re:Apple says Pokémon Go is the most downloaded app in its f... by bllguo on Friday July 22, 2016 @04:24PM (#12146501)

I disagree. The most critical part is #3. Were this not Pokemon hardly anyone would care.

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

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Re:Apple says Pokémon Go is the most downloaded app in its f... by BryantD on Friday July 22, 2016 @04:35PM (#12146565)

Yes, it did. The classic problem for geographically-based mobile games is critical mass. Ingress barely reaches the necessary threshold. Pokemon IP was critical here.

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Re:Apple says Pokémon Go is the most downloaded app in its f... by TeMPOraL on Friday July 22, 2016 @07:23PM (#12147499)

Indeed. I loved Ingress, and I felt more comfortable with that world. But it was nerdy by design. Pokémon, on the other hand, is something everyone has at least heard about - and it doesn't give off that "nerd" vibe. Hence immediate mainstream adoption.

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Re:Apple says Pokémon Go is the most downloaded app in its f... by TrevorJ on Friday July 22, 2016 @05:02PM (#12146741)

I don't know, ingress seems to be pretty active at least where I live.

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Re:Apple says Pokémon Go is the most downloaded app in its f... by BryantD on Friday July 22, 2016 @08:16PM (#12147691)

It's active enough, but if you watch trends even one or two additional players in a big city is enough to make a significant difference in the overall team battles.

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.

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Re:Apple says Pokémon Go is the most downloaded app in its f... by zentiggr on Saturday July 23, 2016 @11:41AM (#12149784)

Been playing for about a year and a half... It seems to me that team balance has always been affected in multiple almost independent ways. Obviously if a new player knows a current player, that will bias their team selection significantly. The part that concerns me is the completely new player, who just found out about the game and decided to give it a try, is asked to choose sides permanently with no indications which side might be better or worse in any way. My choice of Resistance was mostly because I like blue better... glad I chose how I did but I had no idea when I started.

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Re:Apple says Pokémon Go is the most downloaded app in its f... by killerdhmo on Friday July 22, 2016 @05:24PM (#12146888)

is it "most downloaded app in the first week" active? Definitely 3 IMHO

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Re:Apple says Pokémon Go is the most downloaded app in its f... by stcredzero on Friday July 22, 2016 @04:55PM (#12146697)

I disagree. The most critical part is #3. Were this not Pokemon hardly anyone would care.

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?

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Re:Apple says Pokémon Go is the most downloaded app in its f... by TeMPOraL on Friday July 22, 2016 @07:26PM (#12147511)

AR is almost non-existant in this game. It's a semantic abuse to call overlaying an animated Pokémon on top of your camera stream "AR". It's also something you quickly learn to turn off, as it makes catching Pokémon much more difficult. For some weird reason though, mainstream media has sticked to hyping up the "AR revolution" in games.

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Re:Apple says Pokémon Go is the most downloaded app in its f... by stcredzero on Friday July 22, 2016 @07:37PM (#12147558)

AR is almost non-existant in this game. It's a semantic abuse to call overlaying an animated Pokémon on top of your camera stream "AR"

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.

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Re:Apple says Pokémon Go is the most downloaded app in its f... by TeMPOraL on Friday July 22, 2016 @07:47PM (#12147594)

Fair enough. I haven't thought about it that way. Yeah, even Pokémon Go sometimes managed to get me to feel that a particular Pokémon is actually sitting there in the real world. It would probably happen much more often if not for the sorry state of GPS and orientation sensors in even top-tier smartphones.

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.

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Re:Apple says Pokémon Go is the most downloaded app in its f... by fenomas on Saturday July 23, 2016 @02:17AM (#12148579)

I think people talking about AR are referring to the way gyms, stops, and monster spawns are overlaid on real world locations.

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.

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Re:Apple says Pokémon Go is the most downloaded app in its f... by bllguo on Friday July 22, 2016 @05:12PM (#12146817)

Yeah, I was thinking about that. The thing about Pokemon and Nintendo is that demand for a good mobile game was always there.

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

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