SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Pokémon Go is unquestionably this season's hit game. But whether it has any staying power is a very open question, and early signs suggest it's already trailing off.
Bloomberg has published some charts by Axiom Capital Management that show daily users and engagement dropping. One chart, using data from analytics firm Apptopia, shows Pokémon Go peaking at around 45 million users in mid-July, during the week or so following its launch. It then begins a decline to somewhere above 30 million daily users last week.
Bloomberg's article also notes a surge in searches for "augmented reality" coinciding with Pokémon Go's debut.
Niantic, for its part, is "still working hard on several new and exciting features to come in the future of Pokémon Go." Meanwhile, Nintendo is releasing two new 3DS Pokémon games on November 18.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Jiro on Thursday August 25 2016, @04:11AM
I'm not surprised the game has passed its peak. It's really not all that good.
Characters in actual Pokemon games go around fighting wild Pokemon and NPCs, and catching the wild Pokemon. One would expect an AR Pokemon game to do the same thing. Instead, you can't fight except at a gym, and you gain experience by catching lots of Pokemon of the same type instead of fighting, which is a very non-Pokemon-ish thing to do. And since Pokemon get more powerful on a per-species basis, rare Pokemon are also useless since only common Pokemon can get more powerful reasonably fast. Also, you don't get more experience for catching Pokemon that are hard to catch, making rare ones doubly useless.
Also, even the gym fights lack any strategy.
And it *is* a freemium game which makes money off of microtransactions, and those are designed so that it is hard to advance past a certain point without paying.
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Thursday August 25 2016, @06:55AM
I haven't tried it yet, but I suspect they could adopt a "seasons" structure where substantial rule changes are introduced periodically (probably with major updates to coordinate with the 3DS titles).
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 1) by helel on Thursday August 25 2016, @10:32AM
The difficulty with this approach is that the game is just broken on such a fundamental level. It's not impossible but the game needs to have it's core mechanics striped out and replaced to make it any good at fulfilling the core fantasy of pokémon at which point it really wouldn't be the same game.
Republican Patriotism [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday August 25 2016, @08:11AM
The freemium part of Go is bloody insane. Certain items are only obtainable on level-up, but the game is setup once you get to a mid-level (15 or so), everything starts escaping or breaking out of balls. While you can get balls for free at pokestops, you'll never get enough to always have them on hand when something you want shows up.
Happy I got out without spending anything on the game; I'd been tempted to buy some incumbators or lucky eggs, but making a core mechanic require money like that. Fuck that.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday August 25 2016, @09:24PM
I agree that a lot of the basics seem broken. Gyms are easy to take and difficult to defend. Higher level players have difficulty capturing even the most worthless of pokemon (constantly escaping). You can't actually hunt down any specific pokemon even if it is near you. The game feels like a polished alpha version. Most of the features are missing and the ones that are there aren't balanced.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.