The smash-hit Pokemon Go did not appear overnight. In addition to its own development, and of course the history of the Pokemon franchise, there is also Ingress, a game made by the same company that wrote the Pokemon Go application, two and a half years earlier.
In this article I am trying to understand why Pokemon Go was a superstar and Ingress was barely noticed.
Ingress was the Pokemon Go prototype
First, however, let me establish that Ingress and Pokemon Go are really the same game idea. Ingress was the prototype for Pokemon Go, or Pokemon Go is Ingress 2, if you want.
If you have played both games, you notice immediately that they share not just the concept of walking around in the real world and interacting with virtual objects based on real-world landmarks, but also that they do, in fact, use the same map and almost all the landmarks are identical.
This are the two games showing a recent location for me:
There are three portals visible on the Ingress map. And the very same three landmarks are used by Pokemon Go. The two games have different zoom levels and map styles, but if you check the landmarks in-game, it becomes even more obvious that they are not only in the same location, they even use the same pictures.
There are similarities as well as differences in the gameplay, but the main core gameplay element is identical for both games, not surprisingly given that they were both developed by Niantic.
Why was Pokemon Go a success and Ingress not ?
I am not the first to ask this question, but most answers point to the Pokemon franchise or that the time was right for such a game. I disagree. Looking at both games it becomes clear to me that this might be the reason for Pokemon Go being such a runaway hit, but that it is more successful than Ingress, even many times more successful, is due to it simply being the better, more appealing game.
One: Simplicity vs. Complexity
Look at the two images above again. There is a lot going on in Ingress, while Pokemon Go is so much more simplified. This becomes even more visible when you actually interact with a map object:
An Ingress portal has resonators, hacking, keys, charges, missions and many more elements. The screen is crowded with both information and interaction elements. Additionally, there are hidden interactions that happen when you hold a button or a screen location.
Pokemon Go has virtually no information on the screen and only three interactive elements (I am counting the booster slot). The screen is clean and simple.
This makes Pokemon Go the more accessible game. Especially non-gamers are completely lost on a screen like Ingress shows, with too many options and too many dimensions to take into consideration in order to decide what to do. They are frozen by an inability to decide due to information and choice overload. In Pokemon Go, there is almost no choice to be made. If you are in range, twirl the pokestop and gather your reward. Simple, straightforward, anyone can do it.
For my taste as a gamer and game designer, Pokemon Go is simplified just a little bit too much. It would have made for a better game instead of being only a toy (to borrow the terminology from Keith Burgun) if there were an element of choice, if for example twirling the pokestop this way or that way would affect what you get out of it and you would make a decision between, say, getting more pokeballs or having a higher chance of getting powerups and eggs.
Two: Competition vs. Cooperation
Pokemon Go has a very thin multiplayer layer. There are the arenas or gymns, of course, but the core game has no competitive elements. You cannot steal Pokemons, for example. If there is a Pokemon and one hundred people are nearby, then they can all capture it.
Ingress, on the other hand, is a team-based competitive game. Portals are owned by one faction and can be attacked and taken over by the other faction. Multiple portals can be linked and block off areas on the map, you have different options to support your own faction or harm the other faction, and so on.
This is another reason for the success of Pokemon Go. Casual and non-competitive players have a lot more to do in Pokemon Go. You are not forced to enter the arena gameplay. You can spend all your time walking around collecting Pokemons. In Ingress, you will be a part of the conflict between the factions, if you want or not, and the entire gameplay puts this conflict up top.
The two reasons that Ingress appeals to hardcore gamers but not casual gamers is firstly that many casual gamers are non-competitive. They play for their own enjoyment and feel uneasy about competitive aspects that seem to somehow harm and thus — in their mind — reduce the enjoyment of the other party. Secondly, a competitive aspect has an exclusionary effect. You need to keep up with other people to compete. Aside from a few fanatically dedicated players, others soon fall behind, which creates frustration. A small sliver of this has creeped into Pokemon Go where many people now encounter arenas dominated by overly strong players. But this effect is much reduced in Pokemon Go compared to Ingress.
Three: Polishing
It is visible that a lot of polishing went into Pokemon Go. The learning curve is eased with a tutorial in both games, but Pokemon Go is so much more smoothly done (of course the much simpler gameplay helps here). Screens are more clean and ordered, the input system is consistent (press buttons, swipe finger, that’s it) and while there is content creep in both of them, the variety in Pokemon Go is largely limited to many different kinds of Pokemons, which the players minds sum up as one category of things.
This extends to the choice of colors and theme. Pokemon Go has vibrant colors on a neutral color scheme, appealing to a broad audience. Ingress has dark colors and a hacker-/matrix-theme. While appropriate to the game backstory and consistent with its presentation, this style simply appears to a much more selected audience.
And it also extends to usability. To rotate the map in Pokemon Go, you use one finger. In Ingress, you use two. That is a vital difference because it means on Pokemon Go you can do it with one hand while walking (turn the map with your thumb), in Ingress you need both hands.
Lessons from Pokemon Go
While the clones are already appearing, the primary lesson of Pokemon Go is not to make a game just like it. If you are into gaming or game design, what we can learn from Pokemon Go is how to turn a tech demo into a hit game.
I am trying to apply these lessons to my own game currently under development (Schwarzwald), though as a one-man indie developer, I am under no illusion of having such a success.
The first lesson is that simplicity beats complexity. While there is a market for hardcore strategy players, it is orders of magnitude smaller than the casual market. That does not mean every game needs to be dumbed down, but many desktop games have much more complexity than is actually needed to support the core gameplay. Making the game as simple as possible while still retaining its core gameplay is a design challenge. Rethinking a game element instead of adding a new game element to balance it means throwing away assets and code, but it will result in a more polished experience.
The second lesson is that cooperation and competition are crucial decisions that determine the audience of a game. Too many game designers believe that competition is always good and will create interest among players, and ignore entire audiences driven away by competitive gameplay. Cooperative multiplayer games are still a niche, but undeservedly so. The primary reason is that cooperative gameplay is more difficult to design and balance than competitive gameplay where you largely just need to make sure that both sides are even.
The third lesson is an old one: Make 80% of your game, then start polishing to finish the other 80% of the game. Visuals are so important, not for the eye candy factor, but for the understanding and acceptance of the game by the players. A casual player will most likely turn off Ingress at the first sight of that crowded screen. In Pokemon Go, the game is full of simple feedback and rewards that might seem ridiculous, but work. Twirling a pokestop is the same as pressing a button, but it feels so much better. Success is often in those tiny details.
In one sentence, Ingress challenges players while Pokemon Go satisfies them. Everything in Ingress is based around presenting challenges to the player or supporting him in taking them. From hacking portals to completing missions, everything is a competition. Pokemon Go, on the other hand, goes out of its way to make players feel happy. It is full of small satisfactions, from the pokeballs dropping out of a pokestop you just twirled to the feeling of accomplishment when you capture a Pokemon with a carefully thrown ball. For a gamer like me, capturing them is ridiculously easy, but the mini-game is satisfying not for the AR feature, but because something the player did had a positive effect. When there is a possibility of failure, the success smells better than an automated result of pressing a button. Ingress has a similar mini-game, the glyph hacking, but it is a hidden feature, and almost everything else in the game is button presses.
Summary
Despite its simplicity and the hype factor, Pokemon Go is actually a well-polished casual game that is successful because it took lessons from Ingress and made the same game concept into a more successfully executed product.
There are lessons to be taken from the success of Pokemon Go that go far beyond making clones. The main lessons are not in making something with a similar gameplay, but in making something with appeal to a wide audience that creates a new way to play not because it is the very first of its kind, but because it opens up an idea to the world.