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Pokemon Go Daily Active Users, Downloads, Engagement Are Dropping (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader writes:Pokemon Go is starting to lose the battle for mobile mindshare, according to Axiom Capital Management. As such, investors and executives at Facebook Inc., Instagram, Tinder (Match Group Inc.), Twitter Inc., and Snapchat can breathe a sigh of relief, says Senior Analyst Victor Anthony. "Given the rapid rise in usage of the Pokemon Go app since the launch in July, investors have been concerned that this new user experience has been detracting from time spent on other mobile focused apps," he writes.
Enthusiasm about the potential for Pokemon Go (and augmented reality gaming in general) to improve Nintendo Co Ltd.'s financial performance sent shares parabolic after the app launched in the U.S., and even spurred rallies in secondary plays linked to the success of the game. Data from Sensor Tower, SurveyMonkey, and Apptopia, however, show that Pokemon Go's daily active users, downloads, engagement, and time spent on the app per day are all well off their peaks and on a downward trend.
Geez, the other night, driving through City Park about 3:30am on a Friday night, the place was packed with people slowly cruising around in cars with their Pokemon playing on their phones.
It wasn't just there...at major sites all over town all last weekend, I saw a surprisingly LARGE amount of people out all times of day and especially late night playing it...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Niantic has no one to blame but themselves on this one. First, instead of assuring there was server stability for North America they kept rolling out to new areas resulting in server crashes. During this time anyone that was using lures or eggs or other items were quite livid over the loss of an item they paid for due to the server(s) being down.
Then came the three-step bug. When it went away, no longer could the average Joe Sixpack juts walk around and find new pokemon. It was an effort in futility made only https://games.slashdot.org/story/16/08/23/1437229/pokemon-go-daily-active-users-downloads-engagement-are-dropping#worse by the choice to ban 3rd party services that would facilitate in showing where the Pokemon were. And then to top it all off was the cheating. I can't take a gym if the Gym-Leader is a bunch of 35 level bots with great pokemon.
So at a competitive disadvantage, with no real end goal but walking around collecting pidgeys the game was a bust.
Good try, better luck next time pointy haired managers
In Michigan, the weather has been fine and it's been a summer hit.
But the game is repetitive, and players who want to play "a little bit" can't compete in the arms race for good pokemon to fight in the gyms.
More activities and content needs to be added to the game to keep it fresh, and soon.
When the weather turns colder, it will be harder to maintain users in my neighborhood, at least.
Well, this how Pokemon games have been since back on Gameboy. It's the same thing, over and over.. You go to a town, you battle some people, you find some stuff, you leave town and you catch some Pokemon and you battle some people and then you find some stuff. It's not all that different, it's just that fad players are getting bored with it because they never played all the other games.
Also, "layers who want to play "a little bit" can't compete in the arms race for good pokemon to fight in the gyms." That's true of a great many multi-player online games. There are people that sink months on end and scale up to levels that make it not fun for others and those of us that are more casual. This just simply isn't even close to being a Pokemon:Go only issue. Destiny has this. Battlefield. CoD. Doom. Etc. Pretty much any sort on MMO game will see this problem with the casual players. Just how it is and there's no real easy solution.
School started.
Over the last couple of months, when I cut through one of the local parks on its bike trail, it's looked like the Night of the Living Dead: A bunch of zombies obliviously wandering around, staring down into their phones and cluelessly blocking the path.
Lately, the zombie outbreak seems to have abated somewhat, and the bike path isn't so much of an obstacle course.
The developers have been scrambling to keep up with demand, they haven't been doing anything to improve the game or keep it interesting since launch.
The game launched with a very small set of game play mechanics. Since launch, they've removed 1 mechanic (tracking pokemon) and have added nothing .
If they were capable of keeping their launch-day mechanics in place and weren't scrambling to just keep the servers alive (the reason they removed the mechanic they did) then they could have focused their small development team on improving the game instead.
The key mechanics in the old pokemon games was battling friends & AI and trading pokemon. If they added those mechanics into Pokemon go, then they might be able to keep the interest going a bit longer.
Until then, it's collecting things that you can't find. The fun in that wears thin pretty quickly.
It's dropping because:
a) Many people cheated and thus have no reason to play it anymore, Nintendo has since broken the cheats.
b) It was released during summer when kids are out of school.
Come September, the kids will be back in school and not wandering around downtown cores looking for Pokemon.
That said, there are quite a few yet-unreleased Pokemon, so the game will have staying power for a while. I've walked past the spot that everyone hangs out locally and there are still 50 or so people hanging around when it probably peaked at about 300.
This Pokemon Go shit is the electronic equivalent of the Pet Rock, Tickle Me Elmo, Cabbage Patch Doll, etc.
Useless.
Salty much, bitch?
Unlike the usefulness of most other games?
If it brings the user a fun experience, then it is useful.
The Bloomberg article shows the game being off it's launch peak by 20-25% or so, with a spike in engagement that it doesn't explain a few weeks ago. This is normal for this kind of game- and mobile games tend to make their profit on a small percentage of users that spend a TON on microtransactions (more pokeballs, lures, etc), not in raw user count. The game is likely still wildly overperforming what Niantic expected it to- and there are plenty of features (direct trainer battles, more pokemon) for Niantic to implement to extend the game's lifespan.
A really, really straightforward way around that problem already exists - Segregating players by whatever key stats make them casual-vs-god-like.
In the case of PoGo, that would just mean your highest CP critter, in tiers of around 500-ish. Once you get something over CP1500, you could effectively enter an entirely new world (doesn't need to be explicit, although in keeping with the Pokemon theme, they could call it a new town/island/whatever), with gyms controlled by people in the same ballpark as you.
Ok, so you have a really popular app come out. Lots of people try it and like it. Then lots more try it because lots of other people are. This second group doesn't see what is appealing and chucks it. This still doesn't detract from it being popular, or indicate it is doomed.
E.g. Look at World of Warcraft, now has 1/2 the subscribers it did at its peak a few years ago. Despite this it is still going strong as the most popular MMO.
Unlike Ingress, where there is a continuing story line influenced by how well the two factions are doing, and there is a global score that every player can influence, and an in game chat function so players can interact without knowing each other ahead of time, and the ability for huge operations involving dozens of players and the challenge of organizing such an operation (clearing lanes to make way for linking, capturing or destroying key portals, heading out to some obscure location in the middle of the night and feeling like a secret agent on a top secret mission), Pokemon Go really has very little to offer. On top of that, the tracking feature is not what the players wanted (and had at release). You basically go around capturing gyms, which serves no purpose... the xp gained is not worth the potions you need to use to recover from the attack, so unless you are trying to get on multiple gyms to get your daily rewards, there is little point. You also go around hunting pokemon, which is not multiplayer in the slightest, except for the fact that your friends can do it with you. And you can only hunt so many pokemon before it gets redundant... the xp requirements suddenly grow at a stupidly fast rate once you get to level 20. It is extremely difficult to find new players as there is no way to communicate with them unless you happen to bump in to them. If you live in a place far away from water, you essentially are locked out of some of the badges and pokemon (unlike ingress where all badges are accessible, even while urban play and rural play present different challenges).
Essentially, Pokemon Go has little to offer once the novelty wears off.
Useless.
I have zero interest in Pokemon Go but that's an asinine point. Videogames are not meant to be useful. At all.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Unlike the original Ingress. Pokemon Go doesn't really get better with friends. In Ingress playing with a friend can allow you to take down stronger portals faster, and it's the only way to build up stronger portals. You can make giant control fields.
In Pokemon Go as much as people in real life keep chiming on about how social it is. The game isn't social. Playing with friends isn't something the game encourages. It just happens because PoGo has such a large community. You don't run into people playing Pokemon Go because of game mechanics but because it's a Pokemon game. If there was a pokemon match 3 game that gave your "energy" by walking you'd still run into just as many people playing it. You'd still have fun "Pokewalks" together and meet other random people doing their "Pokewalks". But Pokemon Go doesn't have many social aspects. And while the license brought people in. Unless they change the game (and removing one of the few social features [Poke-tracking] doesn't count) I would be very surprised if their numbers didn't fall off by the end of the year. I was actually very surprised more Ingress mechanics didn't transfer over because Ingress is a great game it just has a dreadfully pedantic theme that has no mass appeal.
And yeah the newbie gap is much better in Ingress. A level 1 player can't really affect me as a level 10 player but they can play for a few weeks and catch up to a point where they CAN compete. You don't have to dedicate your life to the game to become effective and (to be fair possibly because it's so small) there's a community that values sharing from a mechanical standpoint. You can only use so much gear. I live in a high value region so if there's someone new and they want to meet I have no problem giving them as much gear as they can handle because I'm swiming in it.
Just another second banana
Also, they just banned a huge number of bot accounts. That's gotta hurt the active user numbers.
I read the internet for the articles.
FWIW, I actually think that if they were to put in some effort, they really could fix it. Just think up a game (or two or three or ten), and add that to it. Treat the previous work as background/setting/universe_creation. Mapping the universe onto the real world was a good idea and I think we're going to see a lot more of that happening in the near future.
Well that's what they did - they put all that effort into Ingress. PokeGo was the culmination of all the crowd-sourced locations and some of the gameplay (battling for control of Gyms / Portals).
Augmented reality does look to be the future of gaming (much more so than "virtual reality"). The problem with Ingress and PokeGo that Niantic doesn't seem interested in solving is that a small group of dedicated and coordinated player can ruin the game for everyone else over a fairly large area.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
After my experience with Pokémon Go (and subsequent reduction in playtime), here are the issues as I see them:
- Too many pop-up messages now preventing gameplay or interfering with it. It's not the game's job to police my actions.
- Acquisition of Poké Balls is too difficult, even in urban areas, given that as you level up the Pokémon run away more and are more difficult to catch.
- Fighting at gyms is just a terrible and unreliable experience. The entire battle system needs an overhaul and should return to something more similar to the old games.
- Back on Poké Balls, some form of passive acquisition method would re-engage me in at least casually playing the game. Even if it was 1 per hour or something, that would help.
- Fighting with other players should be easier even when not near a gym, and should give some rewards.
- The game freezes and crashes often, and is a huge battery hog, and is perhaps the only app I have that actually heats up my device to the point it feels hot. They really need to work on the efficiency of their code.
- Leveling up your account shouldn't be "catch as many Pidgeys as possible and evolve them all at once with an XP-boosting item active." That's stupid.
Obviously, fixing some/all of these problems would be helpful to improving the longevity of the game.
I expect the "speed lock" was in the original copy and paste from the Ingress code that Niantic used to create Pokemon Go from.
They made it impossible to play while riding as a passenger in a car
No they didn't. My son uses my wife's phone, launches the app, it says you are going too fast, he taps 'i am a passenger'* and then usually catches 3-4 on the drive to wherever as well as picking up supplies.
* Somewhat amusingly "I am a passenger" is the only option it presents when tripping the speed lock. No "Cancel" option.
Also somewhat amusingly, he triggered the speedlock during a walk. Not even a particularly fast walk. Again, he hit 'I am a passenger'. Perhaps the button should say "I'm not driving".
I am sure it is to prevent idiot drivers from removing themselves from the gene pool via obtaining the coveted "Darwin Award.
idiot drivers can just hit "I am a passenger" and merrily proceed to kill themselves and others around them.
Sure, the only really unpredictable aspect of this scenario is the size of the peak. If their business plans were predicated on maintaining usage near the initial peak indefinitely, then they were stupid plans.
I'm guessing that the plans for this product aren't that stupid. In that case a sensible goal will be to maintain a modest but loyal group of regular users and to periodically introduce new features that will entice usage jags out of occasional players.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You can kill a pokemon with twice your CP if you know how to dodge its attacks properly and hit its weakness, i.e. "It's super effective"
This is not a game for the "power gamers" who want to level up, get gear, level up, get gear..and win. And I think they are finding that out, they can powergame themselves to have very high CP pokemon and rule gyms but then someone who took 4 times as long to level up and get their pokemon comes up and drops them. It's almost very anti-power gamer..haha!
They used cheating to get themselves all the best pokemon that they needed, and now they "fixed" the cheats and they cry that its boring? haha
This is still a very fun casual game that you can play with your family.
There is something unique to this game in that it solves something that the gaming industry has so far failed to do: encourage exercise and real social interactions. I mean actually interacting with real people, not trolls hidden behind their keyboard with large epeens.
It encourages you to go on walks, travel, actually interact with the outside world. That's been the biggest thing that this game has done for me and my kids. We now go to different areas and walk around. Sometimes its to parks, sometimes downtown, sometimes to waterfalls, or any other random public place that we typically don't go. How many other games actually encourage being active, and being outside your basement? It's also a bit like fishing, seeing who can get the highest CP pokemon.
Like it or not the latest generations (at least) sit more and exercise less, and video games worsen that as they encourage the kids to sit in a spot for 10 hours. Whats that? Force them to go outside and play? Some kids really aren't athletic or have a desire to be..and as a parent you could force your kid to exercise but that doesn't really work well. Sure when I grew up I was outside all the time..but then I grew up in a rural town of 28k, where all the housing and streets looked straight out of Leave it to Beaver. My kids are growing up in the inner city, and I'm not so concerned about kidnapping etc. as I am them having to cross dozens of intersections.
So yes, I'm sure the "fad" will fade a bit as it's newness loses its luster, but considering the unique benefits of the game it still is a fun, cute game that encourages social interaction and physical activity.
That's the problem: PG isn't very fun. The novelty of throwing virtual spheres at virtual animals quickly wears off and there's pretty much no other content. You catch Pokemon, then you level up and catch slightly stronger Pokemon. Gyms only exist so you can increase the meaningless CP stat on your 'mons even further, still for no actual gain other than making future gym battles easier. Oh, and training at a gym only works well if you're already stronger than the strongest Pokemon in there, making it extra pointless.
PG has everything it needed to make a big splash upon arrival - but very little staying power courtesy of its extremely simple and sparse gameplay. To compare it with another massively hyped mobile game, Neko Atsume: NA also has very sparse gameplay with extremely low stakes and limited interaction. But still unexpected things happen in that game, there is an antagonist of sorts (TUBBS! *shakes fist*) and it isn't an offshoot of an RPG series built around its deep combat system and strategic teambuilding. NA says "let's get some cats into your backyard so you can take cute pictures of them!" and delivers just that while PG, by virtue of its heritage, has people expecting exciting battles, teambuilding and carefully training of 'mons - all of which are not present.
In its current state PG is more of a tech demo than an actual game.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
>> Eventually you catch them all and then what? The biggest problem with the game (I walk about 7 miles a day playing, I'm at level 23 which is about 5% of the way through) is that, at first, you are always seeing exciting new Pokemon. But after a while it doesn't feel like you are progressing. Who wants to catch their 1000th Rattata? You can play several hours a day for a week and not see anything new that you haven't caught before. The second-biggest problem is that the game penalizes you for going to natural areas. You can only catch Pokemons walking around city centers and the parking lots of strip malls. Walk a hundred miles in a state park and you'll make practically zero progress. Related to the second issue is that you see people playing on bicycles, motorized vehicles, and other means that are essentially cheating. Who cares if you're just cheating yourself, but if you want to make player interaction this is much harder. If all of the Pokestops and gyms were at places that could only be reached on foot, this could be prevented.
Well, this how Pokemon games have been since back on Gameboy. It's the same thing, over and over.. You go to a town, you battle some people, you find some stuff, you leave town and you catch some Pokemon and you battle some people and then you find some stuff. It's not all that different, it's just that fad players are getting bored with it because they never played all the other games.
Only in the same sense that Heavy Rain boils down to "you watch a cutscene, then you do a quicktime event and watch more cutscenes followed by more QTEs". Technically it's true on a certain level but it misrepresents the game and its appeal.
Your typical Pokemon game is focused on growth; you have to carefully build a team that can take on your opponents and you can't do that by constantly tossing out your 'mons. Training a 'mon up requires some time investment, thus you actually need to plan ahead instead of just going with whatever. Also, the various attacks actually make a difference and make the fights more complex than just "keep attacking until someone faints".
PG, on the other hand, has none of those elements. It barely even has fights and those fights don't really amount to anything. The meat of the game is literally to catch 'mons which become utterly useless shortly after when your level allows you to catch superior 'mons. There is nothing to achieve, no growth of any kind, no strategy or tactics. It's Pokemon without everything that made it interesting.
(And this comes from someone who was never a particularly big Pokemon fan and only played one of the first generation games. Even I can tell just how much PG is missing compared to the main series.)
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I like playing Pokemon Go. It's something I can do when I have a few minutes to myself. I can also go walk around local parks and attractions with my wife or the whole family. Even my mom thought it was fun. We had a great time on vacation with it, whereas the kids might have complained about "being bored" on a hot day, they loved to go to the park and wander around catching Pokemon. It's a scavenger hunt that you can play alone or with others. I've spent a grand total of $5 on it, which is pretty good for something that provided hours of entertainment.
It's harder to play when I've got to work, and the kids are going back to school so we don't have as many opportunities to play. I'm betting less people play in the wintertime, anyway, since in many temperate zones you aren't going to want to be outside for hours when it's raining, snowing and generally unpleasant.
There are many directions they can take this game, and they can add new features like trading, PvP, etc. When new features come out, people can dust off their old accounts and re-engage, just in time for the spring/summer -- or maybe they roll out the features in the winter when there's likely to be less people playing.
Well, true there have been some extreme server problems due to load. The worst one is when you can take the opponent down to 1 hp, but newer kill it.
But in a normal battle without lag, a vaporeon can kill a Flareon with twice the cp. And that is without doing any dodging.