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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.
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
School started.
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.
Unlike the usefulness of most other games?
If it brings the user a fun experience, then it is useful.