How Pokemania Broke ‘Pokemon Go’
The long-promised augmented-reality game Pokémon Go rolled out to iOS and Android on July 6th, instantly becoming one of the biggest mobile games of all time, and a bona fide pop cultural phenomenon to boot. And then it broke.
The original plan was for the game to be gradually turned on in every territory around the world, starting in Australia, and then the United States before it would find its way to Canada, South America, Europe and finally Asia. By Friday afternoon, the game’s rollout had completely stalled. It hadn’t made it beyond the U.S. release – and players there were experiencing crashes and other problems.
“We’re right in the middle of a staged rollout,” said the game’s developer, Niantic Labs CEO John Hanke, on July 8th – two days after the game was first released. “We’ve had the servers go up and down a few times in the last 24 hours, and we’re getting the kinks worked out. Demand was much higher than what we expected, and we expected a lot, but as things took off on social media, we have gotten hammered.”
How hammered? Hanke is reluctant to put an actual number on the enormous size of the game’s audience, saying only, “It’s a very large number of people all trying to play the game all at once. It’s a few hundred percent more than we had expected.”
According to analytics firm SimilarWeb, the game is already bigger than Tinder on Android devices, and 60 percent of those who have downloaded it are playing it every day. For some context, that means that in terms of daily active users, the metric used to measure how engaged an audience is, Pokémon Go is currently about the same size as Twitter. In the next few days it will almost certainly overtake the social network, which recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary.
This kind of global Pokémania is not new. Since 1996, the series has sold more than 300 million copies on Nintendo’s own handheld systems, along with billions of dollars worth of T-shirts, toys, candy and other merchandise. The response to each new release is typically up there with the level of crazy we see for the really big pop culture stuff like Marvel movies and Star Wars. But Pokémon Go is different. Its mobile, social nature – and innovative use of both GPS location and augmented-reality – encourages people to go out into the real world, find Pokémon at real-life-locations and point their phone camera at stuff, making it a highly visible phenomenon that’s already much-discussed outside of the gaming world.
Since the game launched, it’s been all over social media. Dallas Mavericks players Devin Harris, Dwight Powell and Salah Mejri shared photos from the team’s locker room with a Doduo (a two-headed bird whose special ability is listed, matter-of-factly, as “tangled feet”). League of Legends teams Cloud9 and Team SoloMid were photographed playing the game when they should have been prepping for a match on Friday afternoon. In Texas, a man shared photos that went viral of his attempts to catch a Pidgey as his wife was in labor. In Australia, the Northern Territory Police urged Pokémon players to “look up, away from your phone and both ways before crossing the street. That Sandshrew isn’t going anywhere fast.”
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