Pokémon Go was a 'success disaster' and Niantic is still chasing another hit
- Reference: 1693549872
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/09/01/pokemon_go_success_disaster/
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The mobile game is a collaboration with Japanese video game publisher Capcom and has been [1]soft launched in select markets where gamers are already joining forces with friends to take down monsters only visible through the screens on their smartphones.
It's hard for Niantic to live up to expectations after the success of Pokémon Go – the game that became both an instant phenomenon and [2]nuisance in 2016. According to [3]Business of Apps , at its peak the game drew in more than 250 million people per month. In 2021, it still brought in $1.21 billion in revenue.
[4]
Pokemon Go has had successors – like virtual pet game Peridot, another Nintendo team-up called Pikmin Bloom, Harry Potter tie-in Wizards Unite, and a few others – none of which have had anything remotely like Pokémon Go's success.
[5]
[6]
"Pokémon Go was the biggest success of any company from a ramp perspective. Going from nothing to that – nobody else has ever done that. None of the other games released have been in that category," Niantic senior vice president of engineering, Brian McClendon told The Register on the sidelines of Augmented World Expo (AWE) Asia 2023 in Singapore on Wednesday.
"If I had to predict, I would say Monster Hunter will be closer than anything else we've ever done," he added with a cheeky smile, as if the marketing department were to walk around the corner at any moment.
[7]
McClendon refers to Pokémon Go as a "success disaster" – a term he also uses to describe the launch of Google Earth. Both were products in which he and Niantic founder John Hanke were heavily involved. Google Earth's 2005 launch crashed the chocolate factory's servers when 100 million users very quickly gave the tool a try, using up more than half of the web giant's bandwidth.
It taught Hanke and McClendon lessons that came in handy when it came to Pokémon Go's sudden surge. Even so, the early days and weeks of the game were plagued with crashes, lags and limited functionality – such as the in-game tracking system that broke almost immediately under the strain – that took time to overcome.
"Building a server infrastructure that can handle geographic sharding of the world, was something that we got very, very good at," said McClendon.
[8]
"We've improved the infrastructure and rebuilt it. We're still built on Google Cloud services but, you know, we reimplemented things in a much more scalable way," he said.
The seven years between Pokémon Go and Monster Hunter Now is an eon in terms of technology development. Back in 2016 Microsoft had just begun shipment of its original [9]HoloLens headset, Google hadn't yet released its [10]ARCore software development kit, and International Data Corp (IDC) [11]predicted 189.8 percent growth year-on-year in the AR headset market.
Since then Apple has [12]unveiled its $3,500 Vision Pro and IDC has pegged growth for AR and VR headset shipments combined at 14 percent year on year.
[13]We're about to hit peak device count, says HTC veep, as AR takes over
[14]By 2026, total AR/VR goggle sales will trail a single quarter of current tablet shipments
[15]Metaverses are flopping – hard – says Gartner
[16]Metaverse? Apple thinks $3,500 AR ski goggles are the betterverse
Positioning and mapping technologies – the competitive edge behind Niantic's products – have also changed.
"We use the content from our developers and from our users – Ingress and Pokémon Go – to collect videos and scans that are then used to build these maps," McClendon [17]told an audience at AWE. "And these maps are much higher resolution than any maps that I've built in the past – even in my ten years at Google. And we're able to build this without any LIDAR at all."
McClendon added that keeping data up to date was also a challenge. "The world is ever changing around us and as you get higher and higher in your resolution, the world changes even more. And so we're learning a lot about building accurate maps."
Developers can access that map technology to create their own AR through Niantic's Lightship Augmented Reality Developer Kit (ARDK) – and McClendon told The Register hundreds do so.
But many more – thousands, said McClendon – are using 8th Wall, the development platform it [18]acquired in March.
"It's a lighter weight lift, it's in JavaScript, it's easier to develop and the experiences tend to be smaller. They're built by development groups and agencies who are typically doing a marketing or demonstration experience," explained McClendon.
"So I like to think of 8th Wall as sort of our Darwinian experiment where everybody's trying everything in AR and some of some of them are doing some amazing things with it," he added.
And because it's 2023, starting on Wednesday 8th Wall comes with [19]generative AI developer tools .
"Being able to integrate one of these AR models into a web based platform like 8th Wall – one of the hardest problems is if you're a ChatGPT customer, you get a key, and that key enables you to do it. But if you try to combine it with somebody else's web surface, then you're showing your key to your end users," McClendon told The Reg
"So what we're allowing is for your developer keys to be hidden, yet still having all of the access to your ChatGPT or DALL-E or Inworld," he explained.
But for someone whose company has integrated generative AI into an arguably metaverse related product, McClendon seems uncharacteristically, yet refreshingly, cautious.
"If you're trying to deploy to this large physical world, you can't custom author content and experiences for all the geographic locations in the world. But a computer can," said McClendon.
"And so customized experiences for your particular environment – which is unique to both your time and place – is something I think Gen AI will eventually get very good at. But the path to that – that's more like a three to five year kind of future. We need to improve both image generation and language model understanding and semantic understanding,” added the engineering veep.
As for the metaverse, he said most people want to interact in the physical world.
"We can argue about how many hours a day we spend on the phone, but our phone is really allowing us to just peek through a pinhole into this virtual world," said McClendon. "We still spend our time face to face talking to people living our lives. And, even if we're wearing glasses, our goal is to see the real world." ®
Get our [20]Tech Resources
[1] https://nianticlabs.com/news/monster-hunter-now
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-37183161
[3] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/pokemon-go-statistics/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZPG2RFIkuHbgIaGndRN20wAAAMY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZPG2RFIkuHbgIaGndRN20wAAAMY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZPG2RFIkuHbgIaGndRN20wAAAMY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZPG2RFIkuHbgIaGndRN20wAAAMY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZPG2RFIkuHbgIaGndRN20wAAAMY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2016/10/12/hololens_microsoft_nerd_goggles/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2017/08/31/google_arcore_brings_ar_to_small_audience/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2016/04/22/idc_vr_ar_2016_sales/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/05/apple_vision_pro/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/30/peak_screen_xr_next_htc/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/22/idc_ar_vr_hardware_predictions/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/metaverse_adoption_slow_gartner/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/05/apple_vision_pro/
[17] https://www.aweasia.com/blog/brian-mcclendon
[18] https://nianticlabs.com/news/welcome-8thwall?hl=en
[19] https://www.8thwall.com/blog/post/132311005596/generative-ai-tools
[20] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: The buzz has worn off
Pokemon Go had a ready market with all the people who had played games on Nintendo, played the card games, watched the Anime etc so it was an easy grab. Adding in some of the cooperative features like raids has helped foster communities of players together as well.
Wizards Unite should have managed the same with the Potter franchise but it flopped (my understanding is that the gameplay wasn't great) and has since been dropped.
Re: The buzz has worn off
I think the Potter title might have suffered from some parts of gameplay needing AR, this was at a time when it was not supported well / at all on many phones (and especially not on low end phones). I know there are a lot of youngsters out there whose parents buy them phones far more expensive & high spec than the (basic budget) phone I use, but even so, a lot of potential users would have been disenfranchised.
.. Was an "early adopter" of Ingress, many years ago & from that often get invites to trial new / pre release Niantic products, ,
Some of them would not even install on my phone at the time (obviously had a variety of phones over the time of different Niantic product releases), and some that did e.g. Potter, I could not play some AR aspects of the game.
A lot of them really hammered battery when in AR mode, which is not conducive to people playing the game for long..
I gave lots of constructive feedback, but I would assume it was ignored with the apparent approach of thinking everyone has new shiny mega spec phones and massive use of battery burning AR (on AR supporting phones) is fine.
Only Niantic game that I still play is Ingress, whether that says more about me or their products, who knows? (though obviously I am about as far from the target market as its possible to be for lots of their offerings such as pikmin bloom, peridot etc.)
Re: The buzz has worn off
Each of the games has fairly different mechanics based on the same basic concept, some of which make more sense to the original material than others. None of them can be called "the same game" at all, though we'd all lump them into the clone category.
Heck, they might have even achieved more success with straight reskinned variants of the exact same game. A lot of PGo players I've known tried both Ingress and WU, leaving them because they weren't really the same game, and what was different about them wasn't hooking them.
Re: The buzz has worn off
In principle, each game would apply to different people with their gameplay. Personally I thought Ingress's concept of creating links between portals and building up areas was way more interesting than PG, which seems to be just "attack all the gyms" with very little strategy. In particular, in Ingress there was a big incentive in visiting other cities and collecting the portal keys. I don't remember PG has anything similar, but I guess the backstory is more important.
Re: The buzz has worn off
I would still be playing Ingress if V2 hadn't changed the UI so badly that I can't use it without putting on reading glasses, which is kind of annoying for an on the move game.
What is with all this past tense?
Pokemon Go is still being played (well, definitely up to mid-August, when I was last regaled with with tales of daring hunts).
Not in the massive numbers of when it was fad du jour and, of course, no "proper gamer" (whatever that is) will admit to it nowadays.
Hey, maybe the smaller number of current Pokemon players is "it" for this kind of game - all the dedicated followers of fad games will just see this new thing as same old, same old, but actually less - now you can't watch the cartoons or read the manga about the monsters you are hunting, certainly not with the rich background of lore behind them[1].
So moving away from Pokemon to these, what are they - almost pocket sized monsters? Fit on your phone sized monsters? - will at best just eat away at your loyal player base. Find foot; take aim; fire.
[1] apparently this is the way to refer to these things
Re: What is with all this past tense?
You could have said the same thing about the Harry Potter thing they made.
It didn't happen, and won't because it's the fandom that matters.
Pokémon Go had a ready built audience of those around 30 and under (at the time) who grew up with the various iterations of Pokémon TV shows, manga, games, toys etc.
They're introducing their kids to the new iterations of Pokémon TV shows etc, as they can watch and enjoy it together.
So Pokémon Go became a massive hit and is now in "slow decline", as adults stop playing but some of their kids start playing - and of course some parents start playing because their kids are. It'll likely remain highly profitable for another decade if not longer, as long as new TV series are commissioned and new pocket monsters are created.
Any new theming of the core game relies on there being an existing audience. The Harry Potter one failed because half the fandom has been alienated by the author, and (worse) the Harry Potter IP wasn't about travelling the world finding things (other than camping for horcruxes) so making XR gameplay relevant to the IP and "fun" was rather more difficult.
There have been multiple attempts to make clones of the Pokémon IP - Digimon etc - and none of them are still around.
Who is going to care about these new pocket monsters?
By setting expectations of "Another Pokémon Go" they've doomed it to be seen as a failure - even if it makes the kind of profits any other mobile games company would kill for.
Re: What is with all this past tense?
half the fandom has been alienated by the author
I doubt the effect was very significant: Despite the controversy, Hogwarts Legacy is apparently the best-selling game of the year.
The buzz has worn off
Niantic have created several AR games, I didn't play Pokemon Go but I did play Ingress. I loved playing Ingress in the sense that it made you want to go out and capture the portals etc... Pokemon Go is just the same game with Monsters( Pokemons) instead of portals.
Niantic's success was without doubt due to the uniqueness of the experience but we have now mostly outlived and gone through that period.. On top of that their games become hyper-repetitive after a period of time and one completely loses interest, regardless of how much spicing up they try and do..
I highly doubt that they will ever achieve the same achievements as they did with PG unless of course that design something breathtakingly new ( which is extremely difficult to do).