Pokémon Masters, Gotta Catch ’Em All
The Sensational Success of Pokémon Go, what Y’all should know
Unless you have been living under a rock for the past week, you must’ve at least heard about the hype of Pokémon Go, not to mention many of you may already be avid Pokémon hunters roaming the streets looking down on your phone, occasionally pointing it upwards with a finger swiping gesture to catch Pokémon nearby.
Claiming Pokémon Go a success would be an understatement. It has become a phenomenon that is sweeping across the world, driving behavioral changes at a grand scale. It is fair to say the world will never be the same again after Pokémon Go went live, that shit cray! Similar historic events that drastically changed people’s daily behavior were Google and Facebook, this can very much be the next big thing. Many people are curious about the success, and question whether it’s a fad or here to last. Lets analyze this craze based on the quantitative and qualitative data we have so far.
How it all started
Pokémon Go was a successful example of a minimum viable product (MVP). It started in 2014 as a Google’s April Fools joke.
Truth be told, this ain’t no joke. It was a MVP disguised in a clever marketing campaign, together with a minimalistic implementation on Google Maps to gauge user interest in the idea of a location based Pokémon game. The test was live for a day for users to catch 151 Pokémon on Google Maps. The finding? Enough user interest to make it real!
At around the same time, Niantic Labs, an internal startup within Google, was working on their first location based AR game Ingress. The team was led by by John Hanke, former head of Google Earth. They later on spun out of Google in 2015 and announced the collaboration with Nintendo & The Pokémon Company, as well as securing a $30M investment from the three. Less than a year later, Pokémon Go was launched on Android and iOS taking over the app store by storm within a few days, flooding social media with shared Pokémon photos.
Reason for Success
So why is the game so successful? The reason is not because it’s a novel location based augmented reality game, as we know Niantic launched Ingress 2 years earlier and it’s nowhere near the same level of hype. There are also many other location based smart phone games, but few have gained traction. As you can see from the following chart on the week Pokémon Go went live, only Ingress and Geocaching are among the top 1500 of the iTunes App Store.
The success is really because of the Pokémon franchise, which appeals strongly to audiences aging between 20–35 who grew up playing the original Pokémon game on Gameboy, trading cards, or watched the anime and movies. As of May 2016, the Pokémon media franchise has grossed revenues of $46.2 billion USD worldwide. The whole concept of venturing to exotic places to catch legendary Pokémon aligns perfectly with location based gaming, hence making it an instant hit. Many game developers now might want to capitalize on the hype and launch their own location based AR games. Word of advice, without the same solid franchise, there ain’t gon be the same traction.
Scale of Success
Just how successful is Pokémon Go? Well let’s take a look at some data around the first week of launch, bare in mind that the numbers still has potential to grow, given the game have not yet launched in Japan & China, where we believe there’s a massive audience just waiting for the game to go live.
Looking at daily active users (DAUs) on Android, Pokémon Go have already surpassed Twitter within a week it’s launched, and it’s on a trajectory to surpass Snapchat & Google Maps soon.
DAUs at its peak, Pokémon Go have hit 21M DAUs in US surpassing Candy Crush Saga in its prime.
Data from SimilarWeb also shows that Pokémon Go have left many of the popular apps in the dust surpassing Pandora, Netflix, and Spotify in terms of DAUs. Total installs are also picking up at 11% of all US Android devices since July 11, compared to Spotify Music (17%) and Twitter (20%).
Users are already spending more time on Pokémon Go than they are spending on Facebook. In the US alone, players on iOS are spending about $1.6 million each day on in-app transactions within Pokémon Go, according to data from app analytics firm Sensor Tower. Pokémon Go’s momentum seems so unstoppable that App Annie, another analytics company, projects it will hit $1 billion in revenue within a year.
Another way to look at success is to see how much value has it created for its parent companies. Between 7/6 when Pokémon Go launched to 7/15, Nintendo stock price rose by 86%, adding $26.3B to Nintendo’s market value. Though interestingly for the other parent company Alphabet (Google), we are not yet seeing the same effect reflected on the stock price.
Aside from the quantitative metrics, we can’t ignore the qualitative metrics around how this have introduced new behaviors on a grand scale. Almost every day I can see people on the streets of NYC walking and staring into their phones looking for Pokémon nearby. Just looks at what happens when Vaporeon, a rare Pokemon, shows up in Central Park
With something this disruptive, inevitably there are casualties. Ranging from benevolent ones such as pandemic of sore legs as players accidentally get exercise, to the more severe ones such as traffic accidents or people being lured to isolate locations and getting robbed, there has never been a game that have such an impact on the society causing unexpected side effects.
Will it Sustain?
In terms of growth, Pokémon Go is undoubtedly the fastest growing app ever. How long will this last? Could this be a fad that people will eventually get tired of? Or will this be something sustainable and be the next tech behemoth?
Looking back in history, Nintendo successfully launched Wii in 2006 and captured a large previously untapped audience of casual gamers. It was thought be a huge success at the time, but after smart phones took off in the coming years, casual gamers moved on to smart phone games whereas serious gamers stuck with consoles. Wii seen as the console for casual gaming lost significant market share due to the poor market positioning.
Pokémon + location based casual gaming + augmented reality seems like a good mix, but the game right now still feels it’s in beta. Service constantly unavailable due to high traffic volume, app drains battery and crashes frequently, and the AR feature is fairly weak and gimmicky. As a matter of fact, many people turn AR off when catching Pokémon as it just gets in the way. The biggest value people get from AR is to take interesting photos and sharing it on social media.
In order for Pokémon Go to retain the same level of engagement as it continues to grow, it’ll need to make it service more reliable and focus on the following areas:
Social
Due to Niantic being a startup that spun out of Google, it’s understandable that it uses Google sign in, though it severely undermines the social value of the game. Imagine an alternative that uses Facebook sign in instead, you can now easily share your Pokémon profiles, or photos of Pokémon taken in AR with a click of button instead of switching between apps and selecting photos to share. It’s something people are already doing quite often, a well done Facebook integration can significantly reduce the friction of sharing, and hence get broader reach and engagement on social media.
This can be expanded further to share other information with your Facebook friends, e.g. a location tip on where you just found a rare Pokémon, or places with lures so your fellow Pokémon hunters can physically come by and share the fun. User can potentially opt in to share their location with friends on the map, this way as you are navigating the map inside the game, you can also see where your friends are at near by, enabling a new form of social interaction between the game and the physical world.
Also the current notion of team is too broad (3 factions to select from when you reach level 5) for it to be social. Imagine you can form team with a few friends and train/battle with them when you are in proximity. A typical social gathering of friends can be catching Pokémon, and trying out the new catches by battling each other. A day of walking and competition with friends over some drinks sound like a good Pokémon party.
Gaming
The current gaming mechanism has a strong emphasis on farming and not a lot of techniques required.
There’s a bit of technique in throwing the Pokéball, but the visual depth is usually off due to the poor AR, often making it a random toss. Imagine Pokémon will actually notice your presence and move around instead of just standing and waiting for you to catch them. You’d either have to stealth and creep up to a Pokémon, or you just have to be good at identifying the projected trajectory of their movement to throw the ball right. Though this may make Pokémon hunters look even sillier as they are actively running around turning their phones to track where the Pokémon have escaped to, definitely will need some complimentary safety measures to prevent players from hurting themselves and others.
Training a Pokémon is quite repetitive. It requires catching the same Pokémon over and over again, which is time consuming but not very rewarding. What if instead there are missions you need to accomplish which requires you to visit various locations and battle different Pokémon? Ingress already have mission mechanism, looking forward to Niantic taking some learning from Ingress to improve Pokémon Go. They should also consider some of the typical social elements common in social games, e.g. friends can help each other gain experiences for Pokémon to level up and unlock achievements.
Last but not least, Niantic needs to improve the battle mechanism. The reason to catch ’em all beyond the phycology of collecting is to be a Pokémon master that can win all Pokémon battles. Currently battle can only happen at locations where players can claim ownership to, known as “gyms”. Having to be physically next to a gym in order to battle limits a major gaming component. Currently battles are asynchronous, meaning in a battle only one player is active whereas the other player’s Pokémon plays automatically based on stats. If Pokémon Go can support synchronous battles where players will be playing against each other in real time, it can significantly increase the engagement, as well as support the use case where players can battle each other on demand. A successful example of such execution is Supercell, well known for their successful multiplayer asynchronous battle game Clash of Clans, whom later shipped a new synchronous battle game Clash Royale and became an immediate hit. Something Niantic can learn from.
Augmented Reality
As I mentioned earlier, Pokémon Go is not a successful demonstration of augmented reality. However, it has the potential to be a catalyst for AR adoption given the massive user base that continues to grow. Imagine Niantic partners with some of the leading AR products & companies like Microsoft Hololens and Magic Leap to build out great AR experience into the game. As a matter of fact, a development studio called Capital VR have already hacked together a prototype with Hololens to demonstrate how much more fun this is when you can just see Pokémon through a headset instead of having to pull up your phone:
Bottom line, Niantic needs to quickly improve Pokémon Go, making it fun and engaging in order to retain users before the large audience they have acquired gets tired with the repetitive elements. With the great minds from Google that knows how to build large scalable softwares, and Nintendo that knows how to make engaging games, I have high hopes for Pokémon Go’s future.
Connection to Hip-Hop
In the spirit of MC Big Data being about rap & data, I’d like to draw some connections between Pokémon and rappers in this last section. Looking at lyrics, we found that:
- There are total of 66 artists that have rapped about Pokémon in at least one of their songs
- There are 4 rappers that loved Pokémon so much they referred to it in at least 3 of their songs, including Chris Webby, Greydon Square, Charles Hamilton, and PeeWee Longway.
To break the tie, we’ll award Chris Webby as the rapper who best represents Pokémon, given how committed he is to Nintendo with a Super Mario tattoo on his left shoulder.
Cause I’m great like Alexander / Two Poke balls hangin’, spit flames like Charmander / And I got your chick wetter than a Blastoise / She said I’m sexy and she love my raspy ass voice — Chris Webby, Mad Bars
Also a special honorary award to Drake for his Hotline Bling dance parody as a Pokémon master.
