Have even the creator of the Pokémon Satoshi Tajiri thought that its drawing became an augmented reality phenomenon game a day? Pokémon Go which has developed by Niantic Labs and Nintendo together for iOS and Android. Five days after the publishing, Pokémon GO became a crazy phenomenon all over the world.
Why gamers and ‘others’ loved Pokémon GO so much?
Pokémon Go has just published five days ago (July 7, 2016) but according to SensorTower, an app analytics company, the game has an estimated 7.5M U.S. downloads and $1.6M in daily revenue. Meanwhile, SimilarWeb covered other interesting comparisons for the game so far.
Is it amazing start, yeah? We need to clear something before the continue: Pokemon has already a huge group of a fan, but we can not explain its first-week success for just this reason. So Why people are interested in the game?
Pokémon Go is a free-to-play, GPS based augmented reality mobile game. Okey, it is free and this a huge advantage for the growing fast, I want to skip this “natural” reason. Pokémon Go is successful because of it is an amazing harmony of GPS and augmented reality. People both can walk the “real” streets with themselves and also “catch” Pokemons and interact with other players.
The Facebook event for a San Francisco Pokémon Go crawl on Wednesday has 4,100 people confirmed in attendance, with another 19K “interested” in the event (according to July 11). Even the event organizer Sara Witsch did not expect the almost 25k people would be interested in her event just in 48 hours. This event shows us an another evolution of socializing and the future. But how?
Future of socializing and augmented reality
Facebook, Google, HTC, Microsoft Samsung and other tech giants have long been working on augmented reality and virtual reality. We are so close to new kind of experience which people have never “felt” before. Pokémon Go is an excellent example of signal flare that we can see the new socializing.
People have to walk the streets for catching to Pokemons and battles. Although people walk around with us, their mind and concentration not with others. They socialize through augmented reality. Can we imagine this just five years ago? As we know, almost 5k people will meet in the San Francisco for playing the Pokémon Go. They will socialize that the truth but also they will look their smartphones’ screen.
I believe that we will see people who walk around with wearing virtual headsets just a few years later. We will continue to talk, date, eat, do sport each other but the overall socializing experience will change. It will change our lifestyles again how smartphones changed ten years ago.
P.S When I was writing this blog post a guy who was sitting front of me at Madison Square park was playing Pokémon GO. (picture above)