Why is Pokemon GO so popular? Please don't think with your butt!

The title is a bit vulgar. The origin of this is that recently a game called "Pokemon: GO" (or PMGO) has become very popular. It is said that Nintendo's stock price soared by 25% and triggered the circuit breaker mechanism. People who know about stocks understand what this means. Yes, the game was successful, very successful and it is foreseeable that it will continue to be successful and win even bigger victories. So some people said, why hasn’t anyone made this game before? You can tell with your asshole that it must be hot!

It is certain that this Internet reviewer is not a practitioner in the gaming industry and he does not understand the real reason why PMGO became popular.

Why is AR 's "Pokemon GO" so popular?

Product Layer

First of all, we need to make one fact clear: the development team of "PMGO" is Niantic, and the previous work of this team is "Ingress", and "PMGO" uses a lot of data from "Ingress": mainly data about map locations, specifically all the Pokémon stations and gyms in PMGO, whose locations, names, and pictures are all uploaded and applied for by previous "Ingress" players. PMGO can consider not using the current LBS game mode and instead simply search for enemies on the map background (with the help of map positioning, process the latitude and longitude data to generate monster information), and then develop a virtual positioning within the game (official aircraft). At this point, it will be no different from the "City xx Go", which cannot even be called a copycat product. You wouldn't want to play PMGO like this, would you?

If there were no Portal locations and image information uploaded, screened and identified by hundreds of thousands of Ingress players around the world over more than a year, would there be PMGO? In other words, can PMGO be what it is now?

For example, there is no concept of "regional server" in "Ingress". In theory, all players around the world are in one server. When a player tries to Link, the game needs to check whether there are Block lines on the Link track. You have no way of predicting the number of Block lines, which may be 0 or 10,000. Therefore, the game has specially designed an algorithm to quickly determine the feasibility of Link. Without this kind of technical support, how do you ensure that the game can run normally when players are in the same area? For example, there was a news report that hundreds of players gathered in Santa Monica, USA at 1 a.m. because a dragon appeared. If you have experience with games in the early years, you should know that when hundreds of players gather in a scene at the same time, the game will basically freeze. This problem may overwhelm new teams, but during the Ingress Anomaly, thousands of players may gather in an area of ​​less than 1 square kilometer, all of whom are repeatedly throwing bombs and super bombs, eating candies, plugging in pins, installing mods, charging, or querying the server for the current status of a Portal at a frequency of 2 to 3 times per second. Thousands of people are like this. If you do nothing but look at the big map, you will find that dozens of Portals in your field of vision repeatedly flash back and forth between blue and green, like silent neon lights at night - behind each neon light there are dozens of agents fighting endlessly. After experiencing such a large-scale battle, the question of whether the server can withstand the pressure of hundreds of dragon-riding pursuers no longer exists.

Chenglong, the first generation of quasi-mythical beast, is now officially translated as Laplace

One can even say that when I saw PMGO's combat design, I felt it was too softcore. It's basically a collection game, not a fighting game.

Operational Layer

PMGO has only been in operation for a short time and has very few activities. What impressed us most was probably the blocking of GPS positioning. Speaking of GPS, old players may still remember how many planes were flying in the sky when "Ingress" was first created. Almost all of the earliest players of the game were hardcore experts in the computer industry, that is, programmers or code farmers, and it is easy for code farmers to do GPS spoofing. The development team has not disclosed their thoughts, but judging from the history of the game version development, I suspect that they never thought about anti-GPS cheating at the beginning. How could anyone cheat? Don’t we live in a world full of blue skies, white clouds, green trees, red flowers and furry little bunnies?

Then they were severely taught a lesson by the programmers. To be honest, many people do not intend to gain a sense of accomplishment in the game through GPS Spoofing, but simply want to try "to what extent can I change this game through technical skills?" This idea is like that of a true hacker master. Behind it lies the human ambition to understand, transform and utilize nature.

(In the early days of Ingress, some people even developed an "offline plug-in", just like the one in Legend 3: you no longer need to download the game itself, you just need to download the plug-in and make simple settings, and the plug-in will automatically help you connect to the server, virtually locate, and then perform the set operations)

Offline plug-in interface for mobile game COC

It's a good ambition, but Ingress is a game, not a scientific research project. It was not made for you coders to have fun with! Niantic has made many attempts to this end, the most important of which is the GPS positioning issue. In my opinion, even today, the problem has not been completely solved: there are still planes in "Ingress", PMGO can still be played in a cracked version, and the body is in China, but the heart is in Australia. But this is much better than the early stages of the game.

On the other hand, at least they have accumulated experience in organizing offline activities , especially large-scale events. A Mad Men event might draw hundreds of players, while an Anomaly would draw thousands. When the official after party was held, you saw thousands of people sitting on the lawn. It felt like everyone had come to see their idol’s concert or an open-air music festival. Thousands of people, the supply, security and even hygiene issues involved cannot be ignored - did you know that in 2010, the Beijing Great Wall Music Festival attracted thousands of people in the wilderness but there were only 6 toilets? You know that toilet door that's unlocked and has no lights, and when night falls, if the person using the toilet has to hold the door with one hand and use a cell phone to light up with the other, they might as well lower their head and bite off the belt with their mouth? You think it is natural that the operation is done well, but this matter cannot stand comparison.

In general, Niantic's online operation capabilities are average, and its offline operation capabilities are above average. It has rich experience in large-scale and super-large events. To translate it, PMGO may release a GPS plug-in to help you get rare pets, it is absolutely possible; if PMGO is going to hold a large-scale event, you can look forward to it.

Market Layer

Before talking about the profit model, let’s talk about the market. The main reason why PMGO became so popular so quickly is of course the strong IP effect of Pokemon: counting from the " Pokemon " series, it has a 20-year history. Products from the same period like "Diablo", "M&M:Heroes" or "C&C:RA" have already been successful and have spawned a large number of variants, occupying the pop-up advertising space in the lower right corner of the browsers of foreign browsers for a long time, but Pokemon seems to be unknown? The reason may be the model issue: the domestic console market is lukewarm due to [some reasons]. In comparison, Japan, Europe or North America are really fond of this IP. But if we look at the Baidu Index, at least today PMGO is on par with Hearthstone and has reached a quarter of OW - and this is without any official promotion.

On the other hand, we must also see that the pulling effect of "Ingress" cannot be underestimated. In just a few days, a large number of new players in China have flocked to the "Ingress" server. When asked, they all said that it was because they couldn't play PMGO and planned to play "Ingress" for a few days to satisfy their craving. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine that any Ingress player would not consider trying PMGO. At least all the Ingress players I have come into contact with said that they have tried PMGO or are interested in trying it - after all, the gameplay is similar and there is no difficulty in getting started. "Ingress" still has no accurate online figures, and the official report doesn't even mention MAU. Based on gaming experience, there is an average of one Ingress player for every 20,000 to 100,000 people in major cities in China. Based on this data, the total number of players in China is less than 10,000. The situation abroad is very complicated, but based on my personal travel experience, the player ratio in developed countries and developed cities is about 1/2000~1/10000. Overall, there should be hundreds of thousands of players worldwide, or I think the MAU of Ingress is in the six digits.

This means that PMGO already had six-digit user base as soon as it was launched, and 100% of them were real users! This is still far from the millions of copies sold in just a few days of "Diablo III", but it is enough to make any domestic mobile game distribution platform envious.

Profit Model

If there was no Ingress, PMGO would not have the data of millions of Pokestops and Gyms around the world. Niantic would probably have messed up the operation of the game , and the game would have had hundreds of thousands fewer seed users . On the other hand, because of the previous experience of "Ingress", PMGO now has all these, but this is not enough.

What is Ingress' biggest problem? If you ask a player this question, he might say it's the planes, the poor confrontation settings, or the unreasonable achievement requirement - maintaining ownership of a Portal for 150 days is really inhumane. Both are correct, but these are just players' opinions. As practitioners, we certainly have a different perspective.

The biggest problem with Ingress is that it has no reasonable profit model. Things started out very well. LBS-based gameplay was designed (at that time Niantic still belonged to Google , backed by powerful resources such as Google Maps), the basic framework of UGC was determined (Portal application), and then more UGC content (tasks) was added. These concepts together depict unparalleled sustainability. The game can be played for 10 or 20 years as long as you keep opening new portals and new missions. But how do games make money? Obviously, they haven't thought this through.

There are currently three types of in-game payment points for "Ingress": Key Bucket, Fracker (French Fries), and Beacon. Key buckets are one-time consumption and cannot be repeated; Fracker and Beacon are of little significance and are almost completely useless to a single player, and you will hardly see anyone using them in the game. All in all, the store in the game doesn't sell anything, let alone generate any revenue. I dare to bet with John Hanke (CEO of Niantic) that even if he had ten times the courage, he would not dare to announce the monthly revenue of "Ingress" - it may not even be as good as the first-hour revenue of domestic mobile games.

Ingress In-App Purchases

Admittedly, the game also has real income, such as cooperation with Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), SoftBank, and AXA to set up named props in the game; for example, cooperation with the Lawson Group to set up a portal in every Lawson offline convenience store in Japan; for example, Anomaly cooperated with the local tourism bureau during Mission Day, and authorized peripheral sellers to obtain commissions, etc. But how many of these can there be? Anomaly holds dozens of events a year, both main and secondary. Do they think they can support the entire company by just licensing and selling towels, water bottles and badges? Maybe it’s not even enough to cover the electricity bill for the server.

I have also imagined in-app purchases for F2P items, such as opening up the Lv12 Resonator, which can only be purchased/winnable by spending money? 20 Lv8 bombs equal to 1 Lv9 bomb? Design gold edges, wings and colorful animations for Agent Icon/Avator? These are all routines that have been used too much in domestic mobile games, but none of them is suitable for "Ingress": this is a LBS PVP game, not an RPG. The theme of the game is confrontation, not growth. But then again, if you design a mana slot and equipment bar for the Agent, and see the enemy Portal throw a hammer or use a dark sword to attack, I think this MOBA approach may not be very reliable...

After much thought, I finally think there are only two ways. One is that T2P charges by time, such as a monthly package of 15 yuan. If you insist on in-app purchases, you can go for the feminine and cute route, and add more changes, such as a chance to touch a Resonator, a beautiful woman avatar that can be reused 10 times (you can outsource the beauties to studios, there are plenty in China), and the Portal with the beautiful woman Resonator inserted will emit golden light, just like the Dinghai Shenzhen Iron, and you can even see several beauties with different attributes standing next to the Portal. Foreign players don't have to be afraid, if you don't have the Dinghai Shenzhen Iron, you can make a blessing effect of the Virgin Mary hanging above, of course, you can also have Brahma, Muhammad, Taishang Laojun... Anyway, you can have whatever you believe in (this idea is inspired by Fracker/Beacon. Both are paid props in "Ingress": Fracker can double the Hack output for 10 minutes, which is more cost-effective when there are many people - after use, the Portal will have a seven-color glow rising into the sky; after use, Beacon will display an Icon on the Portal for a period of time, which is generally used to help teammates find a point). After 10 uses, you can buy a refill pack for just $0.99 and use it 10 more times (of course, poor people can also use ordinary Resonators). Similarly, XMP bombs and AXA Shield can be used in this way to create various special effects, such as dive bombing, ballistic projection, etc. The golden AK dragon-patterned grenade is all old tricks. The key is to add randomness, diversity, and collectivity, which are the roots of charging - you must be different from others, and you must pay for this difference.

These thoughts came to me as early as the end of last year, not long after I started playing Ingress seriously. Now think about it, if you put Pokémon in the Gym, isn't that the same as plugging a Resonator into a Portal? There are many kinds of Pokémon to collect and fight against, and if you lose you'll die, but you can revive with medicine (the system will give you some medicine, but if you fight frequently you'll have to buy medicine yourself). Isn't this exactly what I meant?

Summarize

When we play WOW, we have a saying that "all problems are DPS problems." Similarly, in the gaming market, all issues ultimately come down to profit model issues. This is because your purpose of making games is to make money (if your purpose is world peace, please find a church to pray), and the way to make money is the profit model. Ingress isn’t a bad game, but it doesn’t have a good monetization model, at least not at the beginning. So the question now is, if even I can think of a profit plan, can't Niantic's many planners think of it?

I think a more reasonable explanation is that they did notice the problem (after a period of development and operation) and thought of solutions, but they decided to reflect these in PMGO. The idea of ​​PMGO was first seen in a piece of fake news on April Fool's Day in 2014, and the project was also launched in 2014, not long after "Ingress" was launched. Niantic realized that they had accumulated enough technical experience, operational experience and user base through the "Ingress" project, and also found the right direction in terms of profitability. Coupled with the strong IP of Pokemon's level, the final product will be an "SSS-level product."

At that time, the whole world was discussing "Is Nintendo going to cooperate with Google?"

Today's PMGO has almost perfectly avoided all the problems of "Ingress" - those problems that have troubled us in the past few years. But new players don’t know this, and they simply use the statement “You can tell it’s going to be a big hit even if you use your ass to guess!” to force the other party into a corner. Yeah, it’s obvious that it will be a hit, so why did you only make it today?

Fortunately, not all people working in the gaming industry think with their asses, otherwise our industry would be in real danger.