Pokemon Go is a location based game developed by Niantic for Andriod and IOS platform. Initially, it was released in selected countries on July 2016, it became an overnight success surpassing Facebook and Twitter in the aspect of live users. Pokemon Go even made and broke many records after its release. People from all over the world were intrigued by various features of the game, the concept of augmented reality is introduced with real world applications.
It was based on the cartoon series called Pokemon, which portrayed a journey of a young gym trainer Ash, who sets out to be the best Pokemon trainer in the world and catch Pokemons in the wild. The game is mainly about to catch Pokémons with the help of augmented reality and location based services. In the game, we are the Pokemon trainer, we need to catch Pokemons and acquire gyms and evolve them just as it was in the series.
Brains behind Pokemon Go
Pokemon Go is the masterpiece of John Hanke, who is the founder and CEO of Niantic Labs. He also created a similar game on augmented reality called Ingress. Before the success of his game, John Hanke was an innovator in Google.
It all began when Google bought a company called Keyhole which was a start-up by John Hanke in 2004. Keyhole was a geo-spatial data company which was further used to make Google Maps more reliable. Hank worked in many Google projects like Google Maps and Google Earth, and later he launched a gaming start-up in 2011 under the name of Niantic Labs. The net value of the company is more than $3 billion, at present.
The Downfall of Pokemon Go
Pokemon Go seems to be suffering the same experience as angry birds that is people going crazy overnight and then slowly losing interest. Niantic removing key features like nearby and having server overload problems hasn’t helped in maintaining the interest of the players.
Here we will see some of the factors that caused the downfall of Pokemon go:
- The main reason behind downfall was the launching of game in various countries, for instance, The game was launched in July 2016 in selected countries only and later after six months it was launched in India recently.
- Another reason was that the game had only 151 Pokemons of level 1, So players after catching all the Pokemons became bored of the game.
- There were also many issues regarding the Pokemon go servers and also Niantic removed some of the key features as nearby from the game which made fans angry.
The Revival of interest
Niantic soon realized that it was at a crucial juncture of game’s lifecycle, where the initial hoopla was dying down and people were losing interest. So Niantic began to roll out updates to keep people interested. Soon the Nearby feature was replaced by the Sightings feature. Christmas and Halloween events were also introduced in the game. The game was recently launched for apple iWatch, Some of sources claim that Niantic is going to update and add class 2 Pokemons in the upcoming year to revive the interest of the players.
What are your thoughts? Do you think Pokemon Go can reclaim its magic?
