This is going to be the same shitshow as Ingress and PoGo. Niantic has two of the potentially greatest games in modern history but they somehow manage to continually piss of their whole userbase.

Niantic has proven again and again and again that they are completely incompetent when it comes to a) communication with their fanbase, b) development of good content and c) quality control.

They had 5 years and hundreds of millions of dollars and what do we get? A completely stagnant Ingress with no new features in a long time and a completely boring and bug-ridden Pokemon Go which rapidly loses players.

Don't get hyped about anything Niantic is doing, you will just get disappointed even if you already had low expectations.

I really really hope a competent game company picks up where Niantic fails and releases truly great AR games.

And yet everyone and their dog knows about Pokémon Go.

In addition to having proved the things you outlined (I completely agree with you, just in case it's unclear), Niantic is also the perfect reminder for every entrepreneur out there that if people really want your product, it doesn't matter (at least in the short term) how buggy it is. As long as it is somewhat usable, people will flock to it.

Better to have a buggy piece of software that everyone wants to use than a perfectly engineered piece of software no one cares about.

Ingress was a total flop, PoGo made money solely off the fact that it was a freemium pokemon game. I don't think it means they're doing a good job just because Nintendo allowed them to use their IP

This is so misinformed. Pokemon Go was the quintessential example of something that was so overhyped, and covered everywhere for a brief 1-month period, then disappeared. Don't mistake extensive press coverage for "everybody wants your product".

Some bugs are fine if you're a B2B app, and intolerable if you're a consumer game.

Taking the subway in Tokyo, I still see people playing Pokémon Go many times a day. Not sure what your definition of “disappeared” is.

Comparatively it disappeared. The hype was ENORMOUS in the beginning. That wasn't sustainable, but it would have tapered off much less sharply if the game hadn't gone from fun to shit very rapidly within a month or two as Niantic made completely unjustified 'balance' changes

That game still makes a bunch of money if you look at app analytics charts.

They really are utterly incompetent, I don't understand how they can mess something like Pokemon Go up unless Nintendo is asking them not to make the game too much like the normal one.

I feel like an intern could add better (not necessarily more) features in a single summer than Niantic has added over the entire release.

Nintendo is asking them not to make the game too much like the normal one.

Serious question, as I am not a gamer: Why are they so successful? Why doesn’t someone just do the same real-world-including game style but with scalability? Are they much better at game design than other people? Better at acquiring IP rights? Something else?

They got a lot of shit for scalability issues but their initial success just took them by surprise, like everyone else in the industry.

IIRC they had at least an order of magnitude more users than their more optimistic estimations.

It does not excuse everything but their initial scaling issues are pretty understandable

Very good question. Clearly they have brand recognition in the industry, I would speculate the this is the only thing they have going for them. It's only a matter of time before somebody cuts their lunch.

Their partnership with google and ingress gave them a massive geolocation database to work with. That’s a pretty big moat.

I live in a tourist area on the southeast Atlantic coast, and I absolutely enjoyed all of the families running around in the streets when Pokémon Go came out. I do hope that Niantic have ramped up both infrastructure and support.

Despite my frustration at Ingress and annoyance at Pokémon Go, I'm not too proud to admit it:

"You had me at Hello"

I will be playing on day one. I'm holding out hope they can catch the hype-lightning of Pokémon, the innovation of Ingress, the wonder of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter (TM) and add a vital third part the other games lacked: long-term fun.

Hopefully this isn't as thin and poorly supported as the Pokémon game. The description makes it sound rather similar.

The Pokemon game was itself just a slightly modified version of Ingress!

Honestly, you could almost call it an Ingress "theme" or "skin".

I really hope this is the future of games, it helps people be more social and get outside of their homes and connect over something very nerdy. I remember being out at 2am and following a huge crowd for catching a Lapras. It was definitely something different and a lot more social than being in front of a computer.

I don't see it as any more social to be honest. I live in Hong Kong, and people walking on their phones was already bad enough before games like Pokemon Go came out. It's not fun when you have to weave around people walking at a snail's pace on their phone, or have to bump shoulders with every other person because they don't see you until you're on top of their feet. My personal favourite is when people genuinely stand at traffic lights for 5 minutes because they don't realise the lights have even turned green.

I meant more social by comparing to playing computer and video games at home. Actually funny anecdote, the crowd I was in blocked traffic for 5 to 10 minutes by jaywalking (it was that big). I didn't join them but I definitely see your point.

I remember being extremely annoyed because my quiet lunchtime coffee spot was suddenly inundated for a fortnight with zombie-like (as in, their frequency, lack of conscious eye contact, and shuffling-like movement) smartphone users all trying to catch a water pokemon down by the river/dock...

Here's what they should do... Make one game and let users choose their theme/skin. License different themes from companies (Harry Potter, Pokemon, etc). Then whatever mode a person is in when they buy stuff, that IP gets a cut.

And then: make that game fun.

That's what they seem to have done. As I remember, my wife's pokestops matched my ingress hubs 1:1. They made the backend on Ingress, and are licensing and skinning it now.

Well yeah, the landmark location data is sourced from Ingress, but to be fair a lot of that is originally from Google Maps, since Niantic started out of Google.

Right, but only ingress landmarks are in pokemon go and I saw no pokemon go landmarks not in ingress. So i'ts not just picking gMaps, it's picking directly from Ingress.