Slashdot Mirror
Pokemon Go Becomes Biggest Mobile Game In US History (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Pokemon Go is now the biggest mobile game of all time in the U.S. Not only has it surpassed Twitter's daily users, but it is seeing people spend more time in its app than in Facebook. An earlier report from SimilarWeb says Pokemon Go has surpassed Tinder in terms of installations -- the app surpassed Tinder on July 7th. Today, the tracking firm says Pokemon Go has managed to surpass Twitter in terms of daily active users on Monday. It says almost 6% of the entire U.S. Android population is engaging with the app on a daily basis. A new report from SurveyMonkey intelligence indicated that Pokemon Go has claimed the title "biggest mobile game in U.S. history." The game saw just under 21 million daily active users in the U.S. on Monday. It's reportedly closing in on Snapchat on Android, and could surpass Google Maps on Android as well. According to app store intelligence firm SensorTower, the average iPhone user on iOS spent 33 minutes catching Pokemon, which is more than any other apps it analyzed, including Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, and Slither.io. The app with the second-most average usage at 22 minutes, 8 seconds, was Facebook. SurveyMonkey did note that Pokemon Go still falls short of other games when it comes to time spent in games. Game of War sees nearly 2 hours of total daily usage for the average user, while Candy Crush Saga sees daily usage of about 43 minutes. In just two days, Pokemon Go brought Nintendo's market value to $7.5 billion. It's worth noting that it remains to be seen whether or not the game will continue to break records or turn into a ghost town like Nintendo's first mobile game, Miitomo.
eventually and people will move on to other things.
Anyone remember the Nintendo Wii craze when it first came out?
IMHO (which is biased) Pokemon has a limited lifespan, until people actually get bored doing the same old shit every day. There is almost nothing compelling about the game, and there is very little if any competition between the teams.
So, while it may be exciting now, because it is shiny and new, once the luster tarnishes, what is there to hold the attention of Dory the Fish?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Not exactly. You can buy your way out of needing to visit the PokeStops to get more pokeballs and other items you need. You can either drop $10 or hang out in a coffee shop that's close to a pokestop for an hour. That's actually what I really enjoy about the temporary cultural fixation on it. It feels like the first truly social game, not play alone with strangers in the basement.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
As Sheldon put it, the beauty of having online friends is not having to meet them. Why would I want to meet these people only to remind me that I'm like them?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I wonder if it could have been the killer app for google glass... if people hadn't been so freaked out about privacy that they would assault anyone wearing one.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Believe it or not, most people have emotional responses like "compassion" and "empathy".
Before you respond with some pro-eugenics screed, consider that people who lack the above traits would be among those on the chopping block...
Required reading for internet skeptics
I know this might sound crazy, but it is possible to walk past a coffee shop, bakery, and even a fast-food restaurant without stopping to stuff your face with a 1000 calorie snack.
I swear, it's true.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Comparing it to Miitomo is a fucking joke. That was some interactive social experiment crap. This is goddamned pokemon.
If Nintendo wanted to make apps, they would need to use one of their actual franchises. That doesn't mean they have to make Mobile Mario (though they could!), or ANY *existing* franchise (though they should!). But it does mean that they need fantasy characters in a fantasy world, not more stupid Mii bullshit.
And then slice virtual fruits using virtual knives to feed the angry birds?
What if the angry birds eating sliced fruits become candy that you must crush?
Inquiring minds want to know...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It'll grow past the game it is and some people will figure out that they enjoy the indirect aspects of the game. Fitness groups, history study groups, faction gatherings, strategy planning groups. Ingress went from a game on the screen to people actually meeting and doing other stuff.
Task Mangler
If you are willing to pay not to play the game, then why are you playing the game? Honestly, I never understood that.
Life or Pokemon?
Large corporations are usually not very innovative. For good reason. They have SUCH a baggage of bureaucracy to haul about that the risk becomes unacceptable. Don't forget, that programmer that produces something has to carry a load of lawyers, finance guys, managers and a lot of other dead weight, so whatever he produces MUST be profitable. Innovation, that's something you can do at a startup.
You might have noticed that even Google, which was pretty much the company with perpetuals "betas" that tossed more or less complete toys and gadgets about only to stomp them out a year later, stopped doing this when they made the transition from start-up to established and entrenched. There simply is no room anymore for experiments.
Corporations like this are far better off leaving the innovation stuff to smaller companies and then either buy them out or snuff them out with the power of the allmighty $.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I am sorry, but I can't feel compassion for people who walk into their own grave because they're too stupid to take a look first. It might surprise you, though, that I am VERY readily willing to offer any help to people who got into a difficult situation without any fault of their own. Not going into private details here, but that can go to lengths others wouldn't even consider.
But no regret, no compassion, no empathy for people too stupid to survive. Ever.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
All the more impressive considering that it's a shit Pokemon game. It's a decent Engress mod, sure, but as a Pokemon game, it's terrible
There are almost no battles. The few that exist are limited to mashing your screen, instead of the turn-based strategy usually associated with Pokemon.
And those scant few battles do not grant experience to your critters. The only way to level them up is to capture a couple dozen of the same 'mon, and grind them into kibble ("candies"). You'll get a couple dozen levels from each candy (current peak levels in the 1000-1500 range). Evolving takes between 15-400 candies. Oh, and the candies are breed specific.
These come to a hilarious point regarding your starter Pokemon. Normally, you pick one of 3 or 4 Pokemon to start your game, and that critter can level with you the whole game long. You'll give them a unique name, see them evolve and mature. You still pick a starter here, but none of that emotional attachment here. Your starter will be universally ground into the aforementioned kibble and fed to a higher level version of itself caught in the wild.
This signature is false.
By a staggering coincidence, there is a PokeStop at my local bar. For $0.80 worth of virtual currency, the bartender can activate a "lure" - the lure draws pokemon to spawn at the bar, and the pokemon and the alcohol (or food - a patio restaurant with the patio within range of a Pokestop is SUPER EFFECTIVE) combined draw humon to ... well, they walk to the bar, and what they do after they're too drunk to catch Pokemon isn't really any of our business. As long as they pay while they're eating and drinking.
To math it out in full: $0.80 for a lure, 30 minutes. So about $10 in costs for the restaurant if it wants to cover lunch/dinner. If it brings in just one more customer to shop there instead of their competitor half a block away - the restauranteur makes money. (The customer has spent $20 for an hour-long meal, during which they grab about 1000 XP worth of gaming per user, plus 12 5-minute-cooldown-regulated hits at the Pokestop, each typically yielding $0.30 worth of Pokeballs, postions, and other virtual goods.)
Win-win situation. Customer who was going to eat a $20 meal gets $1 worth of virtual trinkets from Niantic. Proprietor pays $1.60 to attract as many customers as play the game. But even if it's just one person sitting at a table alone, that's $20 in revenue and even at a 50% markup on the food, about $10 in profit. Net win for Proprietor is at least $8.40.
Every generation of consoles cause streams of claims the sky has finally fallen in on Nintendo. Sega's (and Turbographics)CD based systems were the initial perceived killer. After that the N64 (still cartridge based) was not powerful enough to compete. Then the Gamecube was again not powerful enough to play the games people wanted to buy. Then the Wii was just the cube put into a new box with fancy shake equipped controllers. At every stage Nintendo causes a rip to form in the 'power is everything' argument. Nintendo clearly isnt working on the same model. Nintendo creates fads and they ride those through the hardware eras. They invest their billions on unique hardware and create opportunities for completely original gameplay. Nintendo brought back gaming in the 80s. They mastered the art of fun immersive long form adventure gaming with Zelda, Metroid and Mario in the 90s. They basically invented party gaming with the Wii in the 2000s. Meanwhile their portable gaming has been on the cutting edge the entire time until phones became portable computers. Despite the loss of control over that portable market they have now found a way to revitalize both the portable gaming industry and Nintedo themselves. In a year there will be a dozen games blatantly copying this new innovation and Nintendo will have the best of them. Part of this is because Sony and Microsoft treat their consoles as an inroad to gaining customers in other branches of technology or services. Nintendo just wants people to play their games.