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.