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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?
Or sex with the wife / what Al Bundy would had said.
I do agree it will drop of dramatically in about 5 days. But, to improve longevity you continually release new features until you've turned it in to a AR version of the core games in the series. Trading comes first, new pokemon according to "season" comes next, revamped combat, etc. and you can keep a respectable community for the game. I mean, WoW has always been extremely repetitive but did and does very well. It's just not a cultural phenomenon.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth 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'
pepperidge farms remembers...
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
"Pokemon has a limited lifespan" Pretty bold statement about a gaming franchise going as strong as ever 20 years later down the road from where it started. Not bad for a property that is older than the entirety of the XBox existing, and almost as old as the original PlayStation, just to put things into perspective. But yes, let's keep on claiming it has a "limited lifespan"
Add in PvP and it will get even bigger. Trading is coming which will be a huge incentive, but the ability to have pokemon battles against your friends will turn this into something more addictive than crack.
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.
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.
Not really sure how this is different to trading? I doubt you would be able to ever stand there with a beacon on saying battle me, or trade with me. I had assumed that trading would be restricted to people who knew that each other were playing and the same with PvP. Of course that allows organisations outside of Pokemon Go to organise battles but again no different to trading.
The Wii craze that basically lasted 5 years and resulted in record number of sales and some absolute classic games? Yeah, I remember it. And I still play my Wii. I haven't played it but Pokemon GO is going to be many people's first dose of augmented reality and that's going to give it a lot of staying power.