Pokemon Go Doubles Nintendo's Stock Price (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report form Reuters: Shares of Japan's Nintendo Co soared another 14 percent on Tuesday, more than doubling the firm's market capitalization to 4.5 trillion yen ($42.5 billion) in just seven sessions since the mobile game Pokemon GO was launched in the United States. The phenomenal success of Pokemon GO -- now available in 35 countries, the majority in Europe, and most recently in Canada -- has triggered massive buying in Nintendo shares, surprising even some seasoned market players. Nintendo shares ended Tuesday up 14.4 percent at 31,770 yen, bringing its gains to more than 100 percent since the launch of the game on July 6. Turnover in Nintendo shares hit 703.6 billion yen, surpassing the record for trading turnover in individual shares it set on Friday, of 476 billion yen. Trading in Nintendo shares roughly accounted for a quarter of the entire trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange's main board. The success of Pokemon GO, unforeseen even by its creators, has boosted hopes that Nintendo could capitalize on a line-up of popular characters ranging from Zelda to Super Mario to strengthen its new foray into augmented reality. Pokemon GO is now the biggest mobile game of all time in the United States.

Comments

Let's play...

[Arkh89]

... Bubble Bobble!

Re:Let's play...

[Joe_Dragon]

later lets play global thermonuclearwar

Re:Let's play...

[slew]

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

Unforseen?

[Anonymous Coward]

I still can't figure out why people are so dense when it comes to the potential of augmented reality.

Re:Unforseen?

[godrik]

Ok, I'll bite.

What about indicating in a super market what are the objects that you want and which are the ones that you don't. That information could come from a master list of what you want to cook this week and what is currently on sales.

This similarly applies to clothing stores: your niece would love that dress and her birthday is in two weeks.

Or in book stores, you could pick up the book and have typical reviews show up around it.

In games, the alien demo from MS hololens was awesome. A colleague of mine has one of the dev kits, and the game was fun and exciting. If it is cheap, I'd buy one.

Once again for board games, like warhammer 40k, you could use VR to make the actual rules of the game using a computer and keep track of the status of a unit, show movement, ...

There is potential in virtual art. I think there was a book of gibson (doctorow?) that integrated the concepts. Though it is somewhat similar to pokemon go.

You could do interesting things in recalling tracking from the past. Maybe you have a room with cameras that constructed a 3d model of the room over time, and you could roll back what happened in the room while being in the room. Gives you a different perspective on event. Could be useful for law enforcement for instance.

I see lots of potential applications of VR. now, holding the phone in front of you has definite drawbacks, but a hololens like device could apply to many things.

Re:Unforseen?

[farble1670]

I think the same of AR. I can point my phone at the Eiffel Tower and see... what? The Eiffel tower behind lots of shit that I may or may not want, that I could still read if I just pressed the button and held the phone facing down like a normal person reading stuff.

You didn't have to search for "eiffel tower". If there are geograhically relevant markers, they are contextual to your orientation to the object. Think about a typical indoor map. Instead of finding the "you are here" marker and trying to figure out which way you are looking, AR can project an arrow pointing you to where you want to go.

What does AR give you over anything else? So far the biggest usage is imprinting "hidden" cartoon characters over your high-res image of the thing ACTUALLY IN FRONT OF YOU.

Yes, sort of like if you were looking at a sign in front of the Eiffel tower, it would imprint a high res sign over the Eiffel tower. The idea isn't to stare into your AR goggles 24x7. Think of it like a map where you you reference it to get meta information about your location that isn't otherwise accessible.

Re:Unforseen?

[cryptizard]

Google translate does that. It matches the font and color of the text too, pretty cool. I've only used it for German and Spanish but it worked really well.

Re:Unforseen?

[Anonymous Coward]

Augmented capitalization, perhaps?

Re:Unforseen?

[TsuruchiBrian]

When done correctly it is very useful, it's just hard to do it correctly. Pokemon GO is not actually using augmented reality. It just calls what it is doing augmented reality, but really it is just super imposing cartoon characters on top of video from your phone's camera. There is a but of integration with your phone's accelerometers, but this is pointless, and most people just turn it off.

Augmented reality when it is done correctly will become an essential piece of technology. Imagine walking around with something resembling google glasses and having a poisonous snake identified and highlighted in your field of view. Not only can you run away in the correct direction, but you will know what kind of anti-venom to use if you do get bit. Or just imagine how fun it will be to walk around the zoo, having your AR freak out at all the poisonous snakes it identifies.

This is a pretty specific example that I thought of while at the zoo. There are countless applications for AR.

Some more mundane examples. Having your car show up in your glasses while walking in a parking lot, rather than having to correlate a gps position on your phone to a location in real life. Imagine having the names of everyone you see be super imposed on a virtual name tag, so you don't have to be embarrassed by forgetting their name.

Here is an application that is actually in use right now. Realtime translation. You can use your phone's camera to look at text in a foreign language and have it translated into your native language right on the object itself. This is super useful when in a foreign country.

Re:Unforseen?

[ledow]

Alright, you're the current leader on this thread. All the rest are tripe and nonsense (identify poisonous snakes, my arse).

I've used Google Translate to do exactly this for my Italian girlfriend and her family. Shall I tell you the problem, however? The translation still sucks.

And making it same colour and "augmenting" it into the picture of the menu is nowhere near as useful as just translating it. Honestly, the movement and positioning and losing the translation just as you slide the device over to them, and the translation shifting and jumping all over the place and even changing the words when you're holding the phone relatively still - it doesn't help at all. And though it does a fairly clever job of trying to put the text in the right colour at the right place, it makes a mess of it.

Honestly, after two seconds of "gimmick show" that we did with it, it was then back to human translation and/or just getting the one word to translate without having to type it in.

But, in terms of something that 30 years down the road might be potentially useful if we solve all the other problems with it, you're currently in the lead.

As always, however, the simpler service of just recognising the text and putting up a list of the translation as static text rather than trying to superimpose it on a real-time camera image will still probably win in terms of effort, legibility and speed once the initial gimmick wears off.

At least here Pokemon GO gets free advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

After the US launch there was a constant trickle of news articles about Pokemon GO. Since it was released a week a go that trickle became a huge wave. Every day there are new articles about people playing - mostly positive nostalgic pieces. This publicity is something that money just cannot buy.

Meanwhile the game is so overloaded that my daugher cannot get it to work on her phone. The whole thing is just crazy.

Re:At least here Pokemon GO gets free advertising

[Solandri]

They don't need advertising. Just go outside and you'll run into people playing it. The press could be absolutely silent about it, and it'd still be a huge hit because of this "word of mouth" advertising.

The game has succeeded not only in bringing augmented reality to the public's attention, but at inverting the whole concept. It's turned players (walking around staring at their phones) into real advertisements for a virtual game - kind of an augmented virtuality.

Re:And yet nothing of value was gained.

[richy freeway]

Purely anecdotal, but from what I've seen it's people aged 4 to 40+.

And a fuck load of them at that. Also it's good to see groups of kids out and about walking and riding places rather than just loitering around with "nothing to do".

I want to say I knew this would happen

[madwheel]

But if I did, I would have bought some damn stock.

Re:And yet nothing of value was gained.

[Anonymous Coward]

1. It's summer
2. It's social
3. It's Pokemon

It's a geolocation MMO built with an extremely popular franchise on top of it. The game is based on Ingress, which had something like 7 million players as of last year and even then a lot of people hadn't even hard of Niantic before Pokemon Go. Most of the important locations were generated from Ingress and/or data collected from Ingress players.

I don't think that either Nintendo or Niantic were quite prepared for the rush that is happening right now, I mean they knew it would be big but not quite this big.

And sure, it may be a fad but damn, it's pushing a lot of downloads / new phone purchases

People will look back at this the same way we look back at the hula hoop craze, another frivolous toy that caught on and got people moving... you know, for kids!

Obvious?

[avandesande]

It's been pretty obvious to me that Nintendo's value is in it's IP, not it's hardware. Games on other systems, movies, tv etc. are where the growth is.

Re:Obvious?

[aliquis]

It's been pretty obvious to me that Nintendo's value is in it's IP, not it's hardware. Games on other systems, movies, tv etc. are where the growth is.

It has been suggested before:
25 Jan 2007: http://www.cnet.com/forums/dis...
28 April 2012: http://www.slashgear.com/why-n...
20 Aug 2013: http://www.ign.com/boards/thre...
2 years ago: http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards...
7 Oct 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
21 Nov 2014: http://www.polygon.com/2014/11...

http://www.thetoptens.com/reas...

Re:And yet nothing of value was gained.

[JazzXP]

I'm playing it. It's stupid, it has no depth, I didn't even grow up with Pokemon (I'm about five years too old), but it's actually quite addictive. Not something I'd ever spend money on though.

Re:And yet nothing of value was gained.

[Anonymous Coward]

," said tlhIngan, staring like a zombie at their terminal mindlessly typing slashdot comments like a SHEEPLE

Re:And yet nothing of value was gained.

[Bing Tsher E]

When I play Pokemon Go, I am looking around at the world. Because my phone vibrates when a Pokemon is in range, so I don't need to stare at it continuously.

Re:And yet nothing of value was gained.

[Stinky Cheese Man]

I'm 50+ and I love Pokemon Go. I had lost interest in computer games because I spend all day sitting in front of a computer and don't want to spend my spare time doing that too. I like to get out of the house for fresh air and exercise. But thinking "I have to do two miles today", every day, makes it feel like a chore. Pokemon Go makes it fun.

12 years ago...on slashdot the PokemonGo ancestor

[Ploulack]

https://games.slashdot.org/story/04/04/02/0113231/mogi-location-based-mobile-gaming-hits-japan

I was part of that company. Talk about being too early...data charges for playing were ranging in the hundreds of dollars for the most active players.
http://links.net/share/write/thefeature/Mogi__Second_Generation_Location-Based_Gaming.html

Banana Software

[treczoks]

I tried it, and I'm wondering what the hype is about. Not because of the idea, which is nice, but the implementation, which totally sucks. Very regular and very annoying crashes that waste items, severe server problems, burning through the battery as if it was calculating PI to a gazillion digits (this app is the only one to make my phone *hot*!), etc.

For some in-game advances (hatching pokemon-eggs) you have to walk certain distances. Ok, I know my regular morning walk distance, which is 2.4km. I had to restart this app eight times during this course, and it only "got" about 1.5km due to that fact that it does not count while being crashed (crashing is not that obvious, the display still follows your path on then virtual map, but the background process(es) that count distance, provide new pokemons, or allow intercations or item access is/are gone). Or you try to catch a pokemon - you spend a bunch of those "pokeballs" to catch it, and when you got it, the game freezes. The pokeballs are gone, and of course the pokemon is, too, after you restart the app. Well, and restarting (or starting in the first place) is just trying your luck. During the day it is "just" difficult to start, but after work or on weekends, the app does not even complete the loading screen. It usually hangs at the point where it connects to their server(s?) and thats it. As the server capacity problems have not been fixed after a week, I guess the server side simply does not scale (which perfectly matches the apps quality). That I get the game to start during my walk might be due to the fact that I walk while most of the teenagers are still in bed ;-)

Worse of all, people complained about the loss of bought items (e.g. you can buy those pokeballs if you are to impatient to "harvest" them), so I and maybe some other, more cautious people will wait for the software to getting into proper production status before spending a single cent on anything).

The version number of the app tells an developer that this software is basically not ready for production (0.29.2, a clear indicator for it being beta, if not alpha), and as unripe and buggy it is, it is an insult to the user. No reaction to the bug reports (they just generate an auto-answer that they won't reply to bug reports), and nearly 200k users giving that app only one star due to the bugs. And even those who give more stars more often than not complain that the app is buggy. I don't understand those idiots - If an app crashes regularly, why do they give five stars?

All in all, a nice new gaming idea, but with a total failure of an implementation. I have not heard of the development company (Niantic, Inc.) before, but from this experience, I would not let them develop even a "hello, world!" program for me.

This is our future!

[antdude]

http://vimeo.com/166807261 :O