Pokemon Go, A Success Story

8/11/16

Tyler David

Let me start by saying this: I understand your frustrations with Pokemon Go, because I am also frustrated by the slow servers, broken tracking and overall laggy gameplay. However, let’s take a step back for a moment and look at what Pokemon Go really is, and why it should be considered a success.

Pokemon Go is really the first augmented reality game available to the masses on a device we already own. It was designed by a Google internal startup called Niantic, which previously created a game called Ingress. The point of that game was to work with your team(one of two) to capture landmarks and points of interest in the real world called portals. There was more to it, but for our purposes only a basic understanding of the game is necessary as it really did not become well known until after Pokemon Go was released. The reason for this is that Pokemon has been building strong brand awareness for 20 years. This brand awareness made Pokemon the perfect choice for the first mainstream augmented reality game, but at a cost.

If you’ve played a Pokemon game over the last 20 years, you know that they can be addicting. When the game was originally announced, people went crazy. Finally, we could catch Pokemon in the real world. Not much was said after that until they started conducting beta tests this Spring. After that, we didn’t hear anything until July 6th, early in the morning when the internet was set ablaze by the news that Pokemon Go had gone live in Australia and New Zealand. That was when the problems started.

Niantic chose to perform a rolling release instead of a worldwide release, which to their credit was a good decision. I can only imagine what would have happened if every player in the world downloaded the app and started playing at the same time on the first day. The problem is that we as gamers tend to be short on patience. Within hours, someone found a way to download the game on Android devices in the States, despite not being released here yet. This caused the servers to overload and the game to crash.

The main reason that they crashed was that the servers could not handle that much traffic. Either they did not anticipate the amount of traffic and did not have enough servers, or they had enough servers, but did not have them all available when the game first went live in Australia and New Zealand because they hoped people would wait in other regions. A month later, it seems that the server issues have been fixed or are at least causing less problems for players.

Another reason that people are frustrated is that Niantic disabled the “nearby” tracking feature that was integral to finding Pokemon. Previously, it would show a certain number of footprints denoting how far away a Pokemon could be found. Once this feature broke, Niantic removed it without any information about a fix or replacement.

Once the feature was gone, there was no way to know where to go to track a Pokemon. In addition, Niantic made no attempt to inform the public about the problem, nor did they respond to questions. On August 2, they released a statement about the issue. This was the first time they addressed it publicly, and one of the first times that they have answered questions about any issue on a public forum. This leads to my next point.

While your product is important to your success, your customer service and public relations/marketing efforts are critical to maintaining current customers. If you make major changes to your product without informing the public about why, you have to expect blowback. If you make a mistake, it’s more productive to confront it and explain it rather than ignoring it away. Like many other players, I appreciate that they released a statement explaining the issue.

After releasing this statement, they also released an update with a statement that they are testing the replacement system. Here is what the tracking system looks like now:

While it’s not a permanent fix, it shows the players that Niantic IS listening and working to fix the beloved tool. That is a major part of any new technology, especially on a large scale. You must always know when you need to scale or upgrade. They scaled up their servers and are working on upgrading the tracking system.

So after all of the issues they’ve had, why do I still think Pokemon Go is a success? Pokemon Go is not simply a product. It’s an experiment in applications of augmented reality, exposing the public to the technology while testing the capabilities at a large scale. In addition, the game is having many unintended consequences. People are forced to go outside and get exercise. Strangers work together to find Pokemon and capture gyms. The game is a viral sensation across the world. They’ve tested the capabilities on every continent, on almost every mobile device. While the game isn’t perfect, the results of the experiment provide hope for future developments for both Pokemon Go and other mobile AR games.