The World is Still Pokémon Going Strong

Following up on the game’s evolution and looking forward to the next Magical World

Authors: Jessica Lee and Ivan Lee

Once a month, swarms of people congregate on public plazas, furiously tapping on their phones. There’s usually no discernible gathering point in sight. That’s because the attraction is purely digital. 3 years after the cultural phenomenon landed in July 2016, Pokémon Go is still going strong. In fact, developer Niantic averages a cool $2.3 million per day. What’s working for the game? What’s not? And what can we expect from the much awaited “sequel” Harry Potter: Wizards Unite?

People still play Pokémon Go? Image Credit

What’s new, Pikachu?

Pokémon Go’s launch in July 2016 broke many records in its first month, including the Guiness World Record for most revenue grossed by a mobile game ($207 million) and most downloads by a mobile game (130 million). Since the dizzying initial hype, the game has been steadily making a comeback utilizing new game mechanics to engage its core user base, social features to drive user acquisition, and time-based events to bring the community out to play.

Pokémon Go’s game mechanics drive engagement for both existing and new users. By encouraging casual daily interactions while also rewarding the most persistent players, the game has artfully engaged an impressively broad demographic.

• Gotta Catch ’em All: Staying true to its roots, the core of Pokémon Go is still all about collection. In addition to catching Pokémon in the wild and by hatching your eggs, Niantic has also introduced raids and trades. Raids offer a chance to team up with nearby players for particularly rare monsters, while trading rewards friendship and a sense of community. The delight of discovery and satisfying sense of completion are universal, appealing to both casual and hardcore demographics.
• Pocket Monsters: For some players it’s not quantity but… having the strongest Pokémon to fight to the death. The game is approachable for collectors, but also allows plenty of room for strength optimization — capturing monsters with the best stats, using items to equip the most efficient attack moves, and spending Stardust on power-ups. Most battles today take place in the newly revamped Gyms, where players and teams regularly compete to conquer their local Gyms and earn the game’s premium currency PokéCoins.
• Location, location, location: Pokémon Go has cleverly leveraged the ubiquitous smartphone location API as a convenient reminder to check your digital surroundings. When you leave home to grab dinner at a restaurant, you may as well check what virtual creatures abound. In addition to location-based Pokémon discovery, Niantic has also rolled out region-specific Pokémon. Meanwhile, weather events such as rain, sun, and snow can also alter your Pokémon landscape.
• Gotta keep ’em all: Daily Research Rewards encourage players to check in daily; stopping by for seven days straight may even earn you the chance to catch a legendary Pokemon. Special events and community days showcase particularly rare monsters to encourage players to double down on their Pokémon pursuits.

Who says gamers don’t go outside?

While Pokémon Go can be played solo, the game introduced a set of social features in June 2018 that further drove user acquisition to new heights.

• Friends with Benefits: Being friends on Pokémon Go has a number of key benefits, including trades, extra bonuses when battling, battling each other, and the opportunity to gain experience and level up more quickly. Friends progress to become better friends through sending daily gifts, in the form of a postcard, to one other. Indeed, regularly improving your friendship level and becoming “Best Friends” is the fastest way to make it to the much-desired maximum level 40. From June to September 2018, 113 million connections were made and 2.2 billion gifts were sent between friends.
• Like a Boss: Raids are new events where players have the opportunity to battle together against an extra powerful Pokémon and take a shot at capturing it. Often difficult enough to require a group of people, raids drive local communities to collaborate on Discord and Whatsapp to show up at a location at a particular time.
• Burning ’mon: Pokémon Go has unique potential to combine the online with the offline. Real world events such as the Go Fest drew a crowd of 21,000 in its first year in Chicago with 180,000 players in its vicinity, causing cell towers to go down resulting in a lawsuit that was resolved by $1.6 million settlement. This year the event expanded to 3 international cities — while events are relatively new for the company, offline events draw people together and further strengthen the bonds between players.

Money Magneton

Niantic has been hard at work monetizing its global success. Pokémon Go has amassed $2.5 billion in player spending since July 2017. So how does Niantic print $2.3 million per day?

What’s better than a whale? A shiny purple one Image Credit

• Luring in the Wailmers: As with many mobile games, Pokémon Go relies on a free-to-play (F2P) model. A vast majority of users experience the game in full without paying a dime. Through battling and taking over local gyms, trainers can slowly accumulate PokéCoins, the game’s virtual currency. While enough gameplay is accessible to F2P players to keep them interested, a small percentage of dedicated players serve as whales — paying the big bucks to offset the cost for the rest of the base. The monetization goal of all F2P games is to convert enough free players into whales to make a profit.
• Not so Butterfree: PokéCoins offer the ability to advance more quickly in the game. Required purchases include Bag Upgrades to increase the number of items you can store and Pokémon Storage Upgrades to hold more Pokémon (how else will you catch them all?). Support items available for purchase include incense and lures to increase the number of Pokémon you encounter and lucky eggs to increase your experience. Vanity purchases help customize your avatar’s look and pose. But the most desirable items are incubators to help walk multiple eggs at a time, raid passes to allow you to exceed the single daily raid limit, and event boxes which contain some combination of the items above.

What’s still Oddish?

Niantic has built, by any metric, a wildly successful game. But as a returning player, product thinker and game designer, there’s plenty of room to improve.

• Neither Brain Nor Brawn: A core mechanic of the original Pokémon games, battling continues to function as a primary mechanic in PoGo, serving as the method to control gyms and win raid battles. However, the current implementation of battling simply isn’t fun. Hats off to Niantic for capturing the vast casual gaming market and making the design and gameplay fun for all ages. But a core tenet of good game design starting from Pong through Super Mario Bros. is easy-to-play, hard-to-master. The original Pokémon games allowed you the option to choose between multiple moves depending on the state of battle. In Pokémon Go, you have effectively zero decisions to make. If your “charge move” is ready, you press that button. Otherwise, one can actually play by tapping without even looking at the screen. Adding a mastery curve that does not take away accessibility to casual gamers can make it that much more engaging for the long term.

Oddish AR Image Credit

• Faux-gmented Reality: Despite the marketing hype around AR, nobody actually plays in AR mode. Indeed, Niantic recently launched a new AR+ mode with better real-world positioning for Pokémon. But unfortunately the game is just easier to play in non-AR mode. Without AR, the Pokémon is centered on your screen and easy to catch. With AR, you have to whirl your phone around looking for where it might be and deceptive depth-perception makes it harder to catch. AR is great for the occasional marketing event, but otherwise doesn’t really play a role in the game.
• Full Pokédex: With over 450 Pokémon released, Pokémon Go will eventually run out of well… Pokémon. These new additions keep the game fresh and the collection mechanic running strong. Even for existing players, some only care about the subset of Pokémon they grew up with; each additional generation released further dilutes interest. Without strong supporting mechanics and other in-game goals, what happens when all Pokémon have been released?

Ditto?

What started for many as a nostalgic blast from the past has since evolved into a thriving global community. Though the initial craze died down, Pokémon Go has been able to achieve steady growth, player retention and monetization rates any mobile game developer would envy. Niantic harnessed a franchise ideally suited for world exploration; no other location-based or AR-enabled game — including its own game Ingress — has come close to its success. So can such success be replicated?

Harry Potter is one of a select few multimedia franchises that can hold its own to Pokémon. In contrast to Pokémon’s completionist mechanics which drove a vast majority of player behavior, the Wizarding World doesn’t feature a Pokédex players need to fill at all costs. Niantic will need to greatly step up its game design. A First Look blog post suggests the new Potter game leans into AR, but the game’s premise is significantly more complex than “catch ’em all”. A global plot-driven narrative can be quite powerful, but storytelling is not an element developed in Pokémon Go itself.

2019 will be Niantic’s true test. Three years in, Pikachu is doing just fine and investors are now betting $475 million that Potter can hit similar heights. Games are famously a hits-driven business, and the company is setting out to prove it can once again recreate its magic (this pun, and all puns in this article fully intended).