Why Pokémon Go was like a really good summer movie sequel

When I posted earlier this year about why there were still huge breakthrough opportunities ahead on mobile, one of the key examples I used was the breakout of Pokemon Go. I see it as one of the biggest technology stories of 2016. Over 500M downloads and hordes of people this summer were walking around together placing lures, catching Pokemon, and trading tips and tricks. It was incredible.

Steven Levy wrote a great post on Pokemon Go which I really agree with — go read it. I think it was the biggest cultural moment around an app yet, and more memorable than any blockbuster movie or hit song from this summer.

I believe the new behaviors in Pokemon Go were a huge catalyst for their breakout virality. These new behaviors will lead to some significant new categories of mobile apps around “augmented reality” or apps that interact more directly with the world around us.

While Pokemon Go isn’t as popular or culturally relevant as we end 2016 as it was this summer, it doesn’t mean it’s dead. Games, like movies and other forms of entertainment, have always tending to get hot and then fade over time. You get people in, they have a great time for a while, but then the experience gets old and they move on.

Fundamentally useful tools like Facebook, Snapchat, or Evernote can become a core daily, weekly, or monthly habit. But for entertainment, there’s always a half life to the experience.

But what’s important is thinking about why it grew so fast and so prominently. A lot of people claim that the only reason that Pokemon Go grew as fast as it did is because it had the Pokemon brand to leverage. I don’t think that’s totally right — at least not to the level it really grew to.

What people in the movie business do to create new hits is to build on what went before. That’s why you see so many sequels.

If “Dumb and Dumber” was a big hit, maybe people will also go for “Dumb and Dumberer.” (And they did.). Or if you love Star Wars, then of course you will want to go see a new movie like Phantom Menace or Rogue One.

But sometimes a sequel is a great movie in its own right. When that happens, things can really take off.

The Recipe for a Summer’s Blockbuster

Pokémon Go blew up this past summer in a similar way to a really good movie sequel. If you look at why it took off, there are a couple of things. Yes, people who grew up in the late 80s or early 90s grew up with Pokemon and loved it. But that wasn’t enough.

Look at the new Mario game Mario Run — it has done reasonably well in the app store but it hasn’t created any kind of cultural phenomenon.

First, it was a brand new experience, and it was really cool. It’s social, and uses lures in the real world, which brings people together in public places. It shows the true potential of mobile, because it is using the phone to bring us out into the real world to interact with other people. And it launched at the perfect time in the summer when people were off from school, and also when the weather was perfect.

Yes, I know it was based on Ingress which had been out for a while, but Pokemon Go is much much simpler than Ingress ever was.

All of those things came together to create this synergistic moment where the opening weekend was really good, just like a great movie sequel. The sequel to a popular movie will always draw a certain crowd, but if it’s a shitty movie, you’ll watch it and go home. Whereas if it’s a great movie, you’ll go home and tell other people.

Actually, you won’t even wait until you get home: you’ll tweet about it from your seat and engage your followers about it. And then even more people will go see it.

The launch of Pokémon Go had all of these aspects.

They had a great brand, derived from a huge hit from a couple decades ago.

They had great content, in a really engaging gameplay. It was fun, you got to explore the world, and you saw other people doing it, too.

So the word of mouth spread really, really fast.

Now, not everybody is going to have a property like Pokémon to start with. So most apps or companies may not get a massive hit opening weekend with their new company. But there are lots of lessons startups can take from this. What was really important with Pokémon Go was that it got clusters of people out in the world, playing together.

As those people enjoyed Pokemon, they drew more people to play it with them and those groups compounded.

So if you’re launching your new company, even if you don’t launch it at massive scale overnight, think about how you can get “clusters” of people to experience it together in that way.

Can you get one community or one group of people to all try it together — such as launching in a college campus, or with a specific group of people in one area. If you can get the behaviors just right, then you have a chance to grow and compound from there. I’ve seen plenty of new apps grow this way — from Musical.ly to Discord and Houseparty that can still get to significant growth. Just not quite as fast as Pokemon Go and its movie sequel.