Tag: gamers

How Pokemon Go Became Pokemon Went

On Episode 32 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking about how Pokemon Go became Pokemon Went and share some reasons it may have declined in popularity after the initial hype.

Show Notes

Tim Cook and Augmented Reality

Transcript

Sections

Paul: This is the Edge of Innovation, Hacking the Future of Business. I’m your host, Paul Parisi.

Paul: Hi, I’m Paul Parisi.

Steve: And I’m Steve Miller.

Paul: Are you?

Steve: No.

Paul: Okay. We had a conversation a few weeks ago about Pokémon Go, which is now Pokémon Went.

Steve: It’s more like Pokémon No, according to the critics.

Paul: Not Pokeman, Pokémon. Okay. Anyway, I wanted you to share some of your insights on to why it’s went.

Steve: Why it’s went. Why it’s gone? Poké-gone?

Paul: Well, it’s going.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah, so there’s been a lot of news. I think we have one particular article that we’re citing in the show notes of just how Pokémon GO has declined sharply after the initial hype. It’s true that there have been some issues with the game, and I’d be happy to review those in the next couple of minutes here.
Paul: So what do you mean with the game, because everybody loved it. It was going along well. It had huge traction.

Steve: Right. So, before I get into the issues that I think might have added to some traction, I’d like to just… Within gaming, it is very rare that a game keeps the spike that it has when it first comes out. I think the reason… You know, Bloomberg doesn’t publish articles on, “Oh,” a big game was called Sky Ribbon rr0. “Skyrim players are down,” you know, “PS, PlayStation, reports this.” They don’t say that, because that’s expected of most games. A lot of people will buy it. A lot of people will play it the first week, and then a lot of people will set it on the shelves and it becomes the core group of players essentially.

I think the issue with Pokémon GO is that it was in such a mainstream position and made so much money so quickly, that when the natural decline of the video game came around and it fell more to its core player base, the people that were excited about it initially, it was just noticeable. For what I can tell, this happens pretty regularly with video games. And that’s the rare ones that stick around and continue to grow and grow versus fall off like that.

Paul: So maybe it was somewhat of an irrational expectation for it to continue at the feverish pace that it had begun.

Steve: Yes. Having said that, I think there are things they could do to have kept it at a more feverish pace. I think that there’s probably a sharper drop off than they could have had with all the initial hype.

Paul: What do you think that was?

Steve: I think that the, the article was right, and it said that they removed features from the game.

These are the two things that I think really stand out to me. They said they removed features from the game, and they didn’t communicate well with the audience.

Paul: Well, yeah. Those are two vastly different things. So you go out and you buy a television. You bring it home, and now, all of a sudden, and you unbox it, and you’ve got the remote, and then they come to your house and take the remote away.

Steve: Yeah. That’s a good illustration.

Paul: What their deal? I mean, why in the world would anybody take features away?

Steve: Yeah. I think that they… This is not a justification for them. This is a problem that they hit, is that they didn’t expect the game to be so big. And I think that they didn’t, you know, bug test, essentially, for the scale that it would be used on.

Paul: So they had technical issues.

Steve: Exactly. Yeah. So they, basically, instead of solving the issue, they removed a huge feature of the game that was used at first.

Paul: Which feature was that?

Steve: It was to help you track where the Pokémon were, essentially, to tell you how close you were. It gave you an approximate proximity, basically. And they’ve removed that. And it’s a very different thing to not have something in a game when it starts and then add it later versus to give somebody something and then take it away.

Paul: Well, certainly. Where’s my remote control? It’s gone.

Steve: Yeah. That’s an extremely painful thing to do. There’s a scale of video game issues. There’s a thing known as the day-one patch now, which is becoming famous, infamous. Famous. Either way. Both work.
But the idea is that the publishers saved some of the troubleshooting for the last couple of weeks while the game is getting published, essentially. And then on the first day you get the game, you have this two-hour download of, “Well, here’s all the things we’ve patched out in the last two weeks.” And that’s somewhat unpopular. There are some games, companies, that still work hard to not do that, essentially. So I think Pokémon GO has shifted past the day-one patch into the day-one-we-can’t-even-remediate-this day one. So it’s outside the expectations in that range.

And with, as far as communication goes, I guess, to keep going with the illustration that says if the company showed up at your house without calling you and took the remote and then didn’t tell you why they took the remote. Communication in gaming communities is very big. I know that a lot of the stigma around gamers is that, you know, a gamer is someone who sits in their basement and doesn’t talk to anybody, is on their own, doesn’t have friends, etc., etc.

But the gaming community has always been a very tight thing. I think it’s sort of the modern version of the bowling club or, you know, maybe the card club. There’s less getting together in person, but there’s a tie around a common thing. You sit down, you sit together. You discuss strategies. You play together. These are the guys that you go and do your, I think it’s called a third space in sociological terms. It’s like the coffee shop kind of feel.

Paul: Sure. Virtual coffee shop.

Steve: Exactly. So it’s a virtual third space might be a good way to put it. So there’s all this communication happening already. And if there’s fostered frustration within that community, uh, there’s an unspoken expectation that the game developers might be able to hear that and add it.

Paul: Was there unspoken, or was there spoken concern in those communities?

Steve: Yeah. Particularly when the features were removed, there was why— “When are we fixing this?” “Why is it not being fixed?” And you get a vague, “We will be addressing this later.”

Paul: Oh, yeah. Right.

Steve: Or maybe. Yeah, that’s sure to cause internet riots, essentially.

Paul: Did you get a sense why they didn’t say, “Hey, guys. We’re having problems, and we had to take this, this feature offline for a little bit”?

Steve: Um…no.

Paul: I mean, that seems like a lot better way to put it.

Steve: Yeah. I would love to hear what you think about it as a, you know, as a tech guy and a businessman. But within the video game development, often this happens, and no communication is established. I think it’s a big thing that they’re missing.

There are a few games that do it really well. There’s a game called League of Legends, which is very big. And they actually made a huge change in the system at the beginning of this year. And at the end of this year, they have reverted and said, “We listened to our fans, and we realize that even though we like it, we’ve done the wrong thing.” They are one of the most widely played video games, and they were founded on the commitment of “We’re going to listen to our players and follow through with them.”

I’ve played the game. It’s fun. But I think the commitment to communicate with players might be that key bit that’s missing.

Jacob: Steve, this is Jacob. I was wondering, just listening in on this. Is there an established way for gamers and developers to communicate to each other? Is that like just through message boards? Or is there anything that they have like an established sort of relationship?

Steve: Yeah. That’s a good question. I think it happens a lot through message boards on websites and related social media as well as press releases. As bigger games get more money, they’ll do full-on, almost like ESPN casts, sitting down, talking with developers, or interviews, professional things like that that express direct frustrations with the company. The bigger the budget, the more they can do with that, essentially.

Paul: Do you think, though… I mean, I would imagine the answer is yes. But let me ask the question. Do you think there are different levels in — I don’t want to use the word factions — by of these different groups. There are people that are engaged in the forums or in the communications, in the third…third what?

Steve: The third space, I think it’s called.

Paul: Third space. In the third space. But Pokémon was so ubiquitous that many of those… Am I right in saying that many of the people who played Pokémon probably never had a perception of a third space, or certainly an engagement in it?

Steve: When they came into play? Yeah.

Paul:When they came into play and as they continued to play.

Steve: Yeah. That’s quite possible, I would say. And I think that that was a lot of the shock from the game initially, was the idea that, “Wow, I’m out getting to meet people and play a game that’s… I’ve never done anything like this before.” I think that some of that might be from non-gamers coming out. And people that don’t regularly game, and they’re like, “Wow. There’s community to this.”

Jacob Just one idea in terms of establishing an effective way of communicating with, between developers and the gaming community is using Slack. I know.

Jacob: I use it all the time. But—

Dan: No, but this is the third space instance.

Paul: Hold on. I understand that you’re the Slack champion in this business…
Jacob: I am the Slack evangelist. But I’m just saying, I’m on a few Slack channels for other apps, and they use it as a way to communicate between beta users and so it might be a way of just establishing a way of, like, “Hey. We’ve got this.

Paul: But more practically, I guess, you know… Well, there’s a couple of different things. Let’s address these. One is that you have an expectation by the player. I don’t know what their expectation is. They want to have fun. They want to do whatever the value proposition is that they perceive of the game. So they go off and they download the game, and they play it. It’d be interesting to see how many people became disenchanted with the game because of the feature, you know, demoting the features, because you’re talking about a much bigger cross-section of people than typically play a game.

So let’s say, compare it to League of Legends you’ve got gamers playing. The Pokémon stuff was everybody was playing it.

Steve: Yeah. For a time. Yeah, that’s true.

Paul: So, if I take away a key feature, is that going to affect the gamers? Yes. And they’re going to be interested in it and involved in the third space, forums, etc. The other people that have just picked it up because it’s the thing to do, does that affect them? I don’t know.

Steve: Yeah. That would be interesting. So the, the thing with Pokémon Go is that it crossed over into the app world where anyone who has a smartphone uses an app, basically. There’s probably something there are a future gaming business, but I’m not thinking about that right now. But with an app, if you… I don’t remember off the top of my head, but I think there’s a lot of basically downloading an app, opening it, getting frustrated with it, and not, like—

Paul: Or not.

Steve: Yeah. Not even frustrated, but subconsciously, “Okay, this isn’t worth my time,” and then you close it. And so I’m wondering if a lot of the casual players of it never had to conclude, “I don’t like that they removed this feature,” as much as, “Oh, well, nothing has really changed.” Or, “Nothing has really improved to keep me here.” Or, you know, “My friends have stopped playing.” Maybe the friends that got them into it got frustrated with it, and they just kind of subconsciously moved on, because their friends had, and… It would be tough to tie it all together with so many people, but yeah.

Paul: It would be interesting to segment the adopters of Pokémon into the mainstream and to the gamers. You know, those two sort of groups and see how saturated they were and see how they each responded. But, you know, talking about, you know, yes, you could use Slack, which requires an investment on the person, the slacker, uh, in order to consume the Slack information.

Steve: Just what I want — another app on my phone to talk about an app that I don’t like.

Paul: But why wouldn’t they have just put a message that popped up in the, in the app that said, “Hey,” you know, “We just had to remove this because of scamming issues.” I mean, more marketing friendly thing. Did they do that? Or did it just disappear?

Steve: Yeah. They just disappeared. I mean, you could read the update logs if you wanted to.

Paul: But what did they say on in the update? Did they say, “Tough. Too bad for you”? Or did they appeal to people’s—

Steve: Yeah. I think it was the PR version of that, of we’ve had to remove this because it didn’t work. Sorry.

Paul: Okay. But they didn’t put it front and center. So most people probably never perceived that.

Steve: Yeah. It’s possible. It was a part of the fun of the game was sitting there and saying, “Okay, I’m closer. I’m closer. Oh, I’m on top of it. I just need to look around a little bit under this bush or whatever we are.” So, yeah. So there was the joke about a lot of games get delayed and the way they present that is, you know, they’ll say, “Well, we’re excited to be bringing this game to you in, you know, fall of 2017.”
And the announcement in the spring was, “We’re excited to be bringing this game to you fall of 2016.” So it’s like, there’s no change in the tone. It’s, you know, the newspapers pick it up, and say, “Oh, well the game has be delayed,” but they just present it like, “Oh, it’s coming a little later now, and you’ve got to deal with it.”

Paul: So, I see that, you know. I mean, the new Star Trek series on CBS was supposed to launch in January. And then it was pushed back to March. And people were like, “Well why?” And I think this brings into, you know, one of the things that’s very key in my mind is managing people’s expectations. So if I say to you, you know, if you do this, you’re going to get, you know, a free, free cup of coffee. And then you do that, and you don’t, it’s much worse than if I hadn’t told you that you’re going to get the free cup of coffee. People, especially Americans, don’t like to have things taken away, whether they cost them something or not. And that’s a really important thing to manage in all of these things. And we see that technically all the time. You know, Yahoo just had this problem where they inadvertently, or they had an upgrade, and they had to disable, for some reason, the ability to forward messages from your Yahoo account to a third, second email account.

Steve: Oh my gosh. So everyone that started with Yahoo and moved on to Gmail, missed emails for…

Paul: That…not only that, but as, as Yahoo seems to go into a train wreck of a melt down with all the security issues, people have been maybe motivated to think, “Hey, I should, I should move over to some other service,” went to say, “I want to forward. Oh, I can’t forward my mail. What can I do now?” Yahoo stated that that was something that they had done because there was a problem that is now “fixed.” The future is now restored.

So it’s very interesting. You know, I’m not sure what the real story is there. It would be interesting to see what it was, whether and was a way to keep people from moving on, or was it a way, really, a technical problem? And if it was a real technical problem, you know, explain it to us that are technical. And I’m sure we can understand it. Uh, so I think what you’re saying is, you know, it would be good to be transparent in all of this stuff. And that level of transparency, I am surprised at the willingness for people to deal with the transparency. In other words, even if it’s bad news, they will deal with it better than it being withheld from them.

Well, thank you, Steve, for coming on today and sharing those insights on Pokémon and how it’s demised, maybe. I mean, hopefully they’ll be able to recover. Maybe they can get a little bit more buzz. Appreciate your time.

Steve: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.


Also published on Medium.

Hacking the Future of Pokemon GO

Today, on Episode 11 of the Edge of Innovation, we talk with Steve Miller about the amazing new world of Pokemon GO, and explore the questions raised by augmented reality, in terms of social dynamics, privacy, and business opportunities.

Show Notes

Produced by SaviorLabs. Click Here to Learn More About Us
How Pokemon GO is making Money
Pokemon GO is Helping Restaurants and Bars Make Money

Transcript

Sections

What is Pokémon GO?
A History Lesson
Gotta Catch the Target Markets
Augmented Reality
Takeaways for an Entrepreneur
Privacy and Authentication with Google

Introduction

Paul: This is the Edge of Innovation, Hacking the Future of Business. I’m your host, Paul Parisi.

Jacob: And I’m Jacob Young.

Paul: On the Edge of Innovation, we talk about the intersection of between technology and business, what’s going on in technology and what’s possible for business.

What is Pokemon GO?

Paul: Well welcome to the Edge of Innovation Podcast, I’m Paul Parisi and I’m here with our special guest Steve Miller, who is the director of Pokemon Go Theory and Evolution for SaviorLabs, the company we both work for.

Steven: Just recently promoted to Senior Director.

Paul: Yeah, Senior Director of Pokemon analytics? Or what was it- Pokemon-

Steven: Analytics and research, I think.

Paul: Analytics and research. So we’re getting you new business cards, but you know, we like to be responsive in the market, and we’ve seen Pokemon, and we’re shifting all of our resources to Pokemon.

Steven: To capturing Pokemon?

Paul: Yes, absolutely, cause it is so fulfilling. Steve is a twenty-something. You’re still a twenty-something?

Steven: Yeah, will be for a little while.

Paul: Well, I’m a fifty-something, and I was there, as we were joking earlier, when video games became video games, with Pong and things like that. I can remember when they came out so, hey ya little kids.

So we have this phenomenon of Pokemon GO that has just sort of blossomed out of nowhere. We just thought it would be interesting to kick around some of the ideas that are going on there, some of the technologies, some of the social changes, and really have a good discussion about that.

A History Lesson

Steven: Well, maybe before we go further, and let’s back up a little bit and talk about the basics of Pokemon GO, just in case some of our listeners are not aware of what’s going on at this point.

Pokemon, for those that don’t know is a cartoon series, a video gave, a whole industry, basically, that’s been around for about 20 years now. And it began, I believe, as a video game on a handheld game system. And the point of that game was your little avatar character walked around this virtual world and had to “Catch” them all, catch all of the Pokemon. The game was very open-ended. It was very free. You could go at your own pace. You could catch all or a few Pokemon, if you wanted. You could level them all up, or you could stop early. It was not a perfectly linear game. It gave you a lot of freedom and flexibility.

And so the game is iterated on top of that. It’s constantly. It’s been pretty similar formula. That’s what happens in the TV show. That’s what happens with even the trading card game to some extent. And so all of that has kind of grown and snowballed up till this point of Pokemon Go. I was actually, as someone who grew up on video games, was struck by the Pokemon advertisement during the Super Bowl. I don’t know if you saw that or not. It was really interesting, because it was clearly geared toward someone my age, because it shows these younger kids running around doing cool things, but then at the end, there’s a youngish dad with his child, and the child, they’re playing Pokemon together.

So, it’s all of a sudden, it seems like Pokemon is realizing that there’s this… They have two generations now that they’re targeting instead of one. And I think that Pokemon Go has kind of come in to fill that gap. And so, with Pokemon Go, we all of a sudden now have the old game fundamental of walking around in a world to catch Pokemon, except now it’s moved to your smartphone. And you, a real person actually moving in the real world, affects the Pokemon that you can catch.

And so the basics of the game are you open your phone, you flip it on, and you’re brought to a map overlay, and you can kind of see different things around you. You can see where Pokemon might be. You can see areas where you can get items. And it requires you to actually move and go get those things. And like the old games, it’s not perfectly linear. There’s no set end point. You’re not required to catch them all. You can kind of go at your own pace, and you can do what you want.

But they’ve moved it into the actual physical world of moving around. So, I’ll stop there. That’s a quick, a very brief history of Pokemon, but what are your thoughts?

Paul: Let me ask a question about that. In the old world, when they had the game, was there any collaboration with other people?

Steven: Yes. And Pokemon has traditionally encouraged getting together with other people. And so, the game boy, if you picture it, it’s a handheld video game system run on AA batteries. No near-field communication or anything like that. Actually, it might have had, the red infra sensor. I’ve forgot what it’s called.

Paul: Infrared.

Steven: Infrared. But you could interact with other people. You could trade the Pokemon that you’ve caught by connecting a cable together. And you could even train up your teams, and then fight other players with your Pokemon. But you had to be in the same room with a cable connected. And that’s evolved through different ways. You can do it purely over the internet now, but there’s still a strong encouragement to be near each other and trade Pokemons as you pass each other on the street. There were still things like that in the games before Pokemon Go.

Paul: So, it’s interesting. So, it sounds like the game that’s been released is really nothing more than the old game, except it’s mapped into an augmented reality.

Steven: It is. Yeah. And it’s gone back to some of the simplicity of the old game. I will not go into the technicals of Pokemon. But basically, when something iterates, like, it tends to get more complex. The iPhone has become more complex from the first edition to now.

Paul: Right. More features, more functions.

Gotta Catch the Target Markets

Steven: Exactly. Yeah. And so, they’ve taken a conscious step back and stripped it down to the old fundamentals, like you’re saying.

Another thing that I find interesting about the target audience, specifically, like I said, it’s targeting two different generations. And just kind of a quick story… The games haven’t just iterated in features but also in the number of creatures or Pokemon that you can catch. This game only includes the first wave of Pokemon currently. And even the kind of like mascot Pokemon for the teams and the things you can do to connect with other people, those are also from that first generation. They’re the legendary Pokemon, is what they’re called, that I know from growing up as a kid. They’re the first ones I was introduced to. There’s nothing that really reaches past that first generation point currently.

So, when I walk around at night in my town, and I see people, I’m seeing a lot of people my age out there catching Pokemon on their smartphones. And it’s just… It’s bizarre.

Paul: Let’s go back a little bit. What prompted you to download it? Was it the buzz? Was the buzz overwhelming, so that you just said, “I’m going to download this.” Or was it that you evaluated it before you downloaded it?

Steven: I, personally, was very driven by going out to do it with friends.

Paul: Okay. So, hold on. How did you become first aware of it?

Steven: I think through the internet. Yeah. It was…

Paul: The internets?

Steven: The internets. Yes, the plurals.

Paul: So, the Google or the…

Steven: The Googles.

Paul: So, you read something about it, a post about it, that, “Hey, there’s this new thing”?

Steven: I would imagine. Yeah, I kind of keep in the loop with video game news–

Paul: Alright, so, when was that? That was like Friday, right?

Steven: It’s been known that it’s been coming out for a while before that. It came out on Thursday. I was aware of that.

Paul: So, you were aware that it was coming on Thursday.

Steven: I think probably because my social media friend groups were aware of it as well.

Paul: Did you download it before the explosion happened or after?

Steven: I mean, in internet terms, I was late, which probably means I downloaded it a day after it released it or something like that. But I’ve been playing it over the weekend on and off.

Paul: Well, what I’m interested in is trying to tease out why people downloaded it. Was it they were anticipating it? I mean, there wasn’t a lot of detail about it beforehand. So they didn’t know what to anticipate, except there was this new thing coming out. Was augmented reality a known thing? Did you know that augmented reality in Pokemon was coming?

Steven: I did. It circulated! There’s a lot of good writing within games, and a lot of good engagement with it. And I’m just someone who is interested in this.

Paul: Okay, so you were generally aware of it.

Steven: Yes. But I think it was mostly within the game circle until the weekend when it actually released. So, as someone who consumes game related media, I was aware. But the average person was probably not until it blew up.

Paul: So, some of your friends.

Steven: Yes.

Paul: Would you characterize those as game-aware people or not, that have chosen to download this?

Steven: Yes. Some of them are. Some of them are not. Some of them caught onto the wave. They saw other people playing it and downloaded it.

Paul: And were the people that… Let’s just think of one of those people that caught on to the wave. They weren’t game people, but downloaded it as a follower, basically. Were they aware of Pokemon, and they understood the context of Pokemon? Or was it just, “This is a neat new game”?

Steven: You know, it’s a mix of some. I think that many people my age are at least aware Pokemon exists, even if they didn’t play it or not. But I have a friend, apparently, he learned about it because a number of people at his company were walking around catching Pokemon during the day, during work. And the company is in a central city location. Some of them were even able, from their desk, to pull out their phone, and say, “Okay, I’m going to catch this one that’s near to me right now.”

And so he, actually… I don’t think this friend ever grew up playing Pokemon, but he rode that wave of external hype at that point. So, he’s not a read-up-on-games that are coming out. He’ll play casually, but yeah.

Paul: That’s interesting, because what I’m trying to get to is what is the trigger that caused them to download it. Is it the wave of use? Or is it the knowledge beforehand of saying, “Gee. The new Star Trek movie is coming out. I want to go see that because I like Star Trek.”

So, I’m a Pokemon person. I like that. I’m going to download this whether it’s good on not. And it sounds like there’s a mix. Certainly the ones in the culture knew it was coming. But then it had enough — which I think is really intriguing about this — is it has enough social juice where it became collaborative for a common experience, which I think is really wild. Because we don’t see that in games. You know, Angry Birds doesn’t have that. None of the real games out there. And I’m not a gamer, so you might say that there are other examples. Are there any other examples that perpetuate a social engagement like this?

Steven: There are examples that exist. A lot of them are more fringe, I think. One that might be interesting for the discussion of this podcast and seeing things that come together is this game actually has a predecessor that it’s built off of called Ingress, which I only learned about after this game come out, came out. But from what I understand, it was a very similar concept, just not with Pokemon. But you walked around, and you found locations, and you captured things or gained levels or whatever it was with that specific game. But it was augmented reality. They actually pitched it as, “Ingress, something is coming into your world.”

Paul: Interesting. Good marketing.

Steven: Yeah. Absolutely. I had never heard about that before. I think that it had same sort of social interaction, walking by people.

Paul: What’s interesting is Ingress doesn’t have the stored up value of Pokemon. And so, it doesn’t have the connection. I’m pontificating here. I’m saying does… It didn’t have the initial stickiness or any… There was no handle on it, that somebody that wasn’t involved in it, to be able to grab on to it. Whereas, almost everybody on the planet has heard of Pokemon, regardless of your age.

“Oh, what’s that about?” And you might have it in the context of a game or cards, whatever it was, or a movie. But that additional handle really changed the value proposition for an Ingress. So in some ways, you know, I’m very fascinated to hear the interviews that come out with the team to see if they had any notion that it would have this type of viral effect.

Steven: Yeah. That’s a great question. Thinking from the point of our typical topics on the podcast of business and technology, talking about kind of that, bringing in the marketing, everything behind it, kind of the stickiness, like you were saying… It kind of feels like when Facebook released messenger. It’s, you know, Facebook owns the internet in many ways. And messenger, if I recall correctly, wasn’t that great of an app when it first came out. It just existed. But we all had to use it, because we were all Facebook already. And so messenger is successful, not on its own merits necessarily, but on the merits of Facebook.

And I’m wondering if there is… I mean, I’m not signed up to Pokemon, per se, in the same way that you’re signed up to Facebook. But there is a carryover of merit, so that, okay, Pokemon has moved to my smart phone now. I’m not used to this. It’s moved to walking around, but I’m interested, because I’ve been interested in Pokemon before.

And so, there’s that same kind of… This app has almost borrowed both technology and marketing from external sources. The tech’s already built. The marketing’s already built up. It’s just taking what’s laying on the floor almost and putting it together.

Paul: Well, and it also has the aspect, which doesn’t seem to be a mainstream aspect, of you being able to say, “Hey, have you seen this? Hey, we can go do this together. We can go walk around the real world and capture these fun little things.” So, to me, that was sort of the gee-whiz, wow, because it’s got people walking around together, socializing.

So, you know, we are critical — and I think in some ways, video games are very insular, you know. You sit in your own room. And you may be talking to people across the world, but you don’t go outside. And now, we have this video game that is compelling people to go outside, and it’s funner to do it in a group. Funner? Is that a word?

Steven: More funner.

Paul: More funner.

Steven: Yeah, grammatically correct. Yeah.

Paul: It’s more funner to go out and do it in a group. So, it’s just a wild twist to me that all of a sudden, we have something coming from this — you know, I’m always looking at my phone that is almost mandating that I go out with a group of people and enjoy this together.

Steven: Yeah. So, there are the Pokemon wandering around out there. You actually have to walk close enough to one to capture it, but your phone will give you an option to say, “Okay, as you’re…” And when you’re in the capture phase of the game, you have the option to turn on augmented reality, and all of a sudden, the Pokemon, that was just on your screen before with a kind of normal backdrop, is now placed into the real world using your phone’s camera. And so I have a goofy picture of me, for example, with a Pokemon sitting on my belly or something like that.

But that’s become part of the phenomenon, is people taking pictures of Pokemon in weird places. So, there’s this bird Pokemon just sitting on the floor in your kitchen or there’s just all these different kinds of aspects that have shown up. And so that augmented reality feature of it is another strange but good collision that’s kind of enhanced it. It’s that shock and awe, initial value of, “Oh, there’s a thing I know in a place it shouldn’t be,” almost.

Augmented Reality

Paul: Right. Well, there’s been a lot of talk over the past 20 years about virtual reality and how that was sort of the be all to end all. And, you know, something weird happened about a year and it half ago when Microsoft talked about their new product, HoloLens. And it was this thing, you know, you put on your face. You can still see, but it projects images out onto the wall or your refrigerator or whatever it might be. And so, people are looking at that and saying, “Gee, I really don’t know how that works.” You know, I don’t know how that feels. I get the idea of virtual reality because I’m in a place that I’ve never been in or am not in right now. And I can get up and walk around and touch things, or not really touch them but, you know, look at them and turn around and see somebody behind me. That’s virtual reality.

But augmented reality sort of caught us a little bit by surprise, at least it did me. It’s like, “What are you doing, you know, Microsoft? What the heck is it this thing? And I don’t need to see a spreadsheet on my refrigerator, I don’t need to see a Word document on my wall.” I might be cool, but… All of a sudden this comes out and shows us augmented reality done right. It’s just an incredible opportunity for us to see that, actually, I think that we thought virtual reality was going to be the be all to end all. But now we’re, I think we’re learning that augmented reality may be the be all to end all.

Steven: Yeah. That’s true. Google Glass received, for example, a lot excitement around when it first came out. We may learn… In the future, we may learn it may have been ahead of its time, which I’m not sure that works timewise.

Paul: That’s true. That’s true. I think… Yeah. It was a technology dying for an application. I think if we had the Pokemon Go on Google Glass, it might be a different acceptance rate.

Steven: So, many people would be injured and dead right now if that’s true.

Paul: You’d have to wear big bumpers.

Steven: Playing Pokemon Go right now, please do not disturb.

Paul: So, one of the initial questions was that it’s all free. How do you earn money? As it’s emerging, you can buy different things in the game, what are some of the things you can buy, Steve?

Steven: Yeah, so within the game, basically, it follows somewhat the trend of normal, mobile games. You can do everything without paying. But if you want to accelerate the speed at which you play the game, if you want to make it easier for yourself, you don’t have to walk as far. You can buy abilities to have more Pokemon appear closer to you. Or you can buy extra materials that help you catch Pokemon, rather than having to travel around and collect them yourselves.

The game doesn’t have– It’s not what we would necessarily call pay to win, I suppose. There’s no wall point at which you can’t pass if you don’t pay.

Paul: Okay. So, there’s nothing preventing you from playing.

Takeaways for an Entrepreneur

Steven: Exactly, but you can make it easier to play, basically. I do have some numbers here, speaking of the prices. It’s projected to hit $58.2 billion this year.

Paul: That’s just for people seeking to do something more in the game. Not changing the game experience, but helping them with the game. Fascinating. And they’re going to go to $76 billion in 2017, which is actually a drop, because 58.2 for half a year would be 116 billion for the total year. So, that’s interesting. I don’t know. I mean, this is data gathered by Statista, I don’t know what their metrics or methodology was there.

Steven: Dartboard?

Paul: Yeah, it’s, it’s, fascinating. It’d be interesting to see what their current revenue is. But it is, I think, showing us that all of the technology that we’re talking about here, all of the branding — everything existed. So, for an entrepreneur, you might sit there and say, “Gee, there’s nothing new to do. I don’t know what to do.”

Well, these people took, obviously a good brand — which helps enormously, and I’m not discounting that — but they took a good brand, and they threw it into augmented reality, and they’ve got this wild, successful — hopefully — hit on their hands. Certainly viral. Many times, when we as entrepreneurs look at something, or non-entrepreneurs approach something, they’re saying, “Well, you know everything that has been invented has already been invented I can’t invent something new.”

And I think this is a really great example to show you that that is just so wrong, because there are so many things that can be invented. Not that this is an invention, because they just took conventional pieces and put them together. And it’s a delight to see this and it not be, you know, something weird or terrible but accessible by the full spectrum of people all over the world. You know, whether you’re six or you’re 60, you could use this game and enjoy it.

Steven: Yea, so the game has gained both money. It’s also gained extreme traction in terms of number of users. I believe that it surpassed Twitter already in daily active users, which is pretty incredible, considering it is not even released in every country yet. It’s still, I believe, the United States and Australia.

Paul: Right. But Twitter is a very vertical product. It’s not a general interest. So, I think it is incredible traction. I mean, if anybody can get the traction that Twitter has, they’d be delighted. So, for this to do that, just really establishes that it’s a great idea.

Steven: Yeah. Absolutely.

Interlude

Privacy and Authentication with Google

Steven: I have an important question for you.

Paul: Okay.

Steven: Have you caught them all?

Paul: No. No, I actually can’t figure out how to get it installed. No, that’s not true. I just didn’t have my Google password with me. I thought it was interesting that they chose to use authenticate with Google.

Steven: Yeah, did you read about the Google authentication with iOS?

Paul: Well, I heard you tell me about it. But I didn’t read about it yet.

Steven: Yeah, so apparently, Google was taking all of your information on iOS, or rather, the app was. It was requesting full permissions from Google, which is something only Chrome and Gmail use.

Paul: Right. Yeah, I think it’s interesting. I mean, there’s a lot to talk about with this, and, I think there’s a lot of societal things, there’s a lot of technical things. But, you know, it points out that humans are driven by engagement. They want to be engaged with whatever is going on and what’s interesting. And that’s… I mean, if a million people find something interesting, it’s probably interesting.

So, when they went and installed this in the rush to participate, they, you know, could easily bypass, or not ask that question, “What exactly am I giving up in this exchange here?”

Steven: I’ve only actually ever had one app that said, “This does not require permissions.” It’s my favorite app, probably, just because of that.

Paul: Which app is that?

Steven: It helps you pick cards for a game called Dominion. It’s an open source app, and I smiled when I saw that. I was like, “Wow. You guys are smart.”

Paul: Yeah, it is very interesting. I mean, you know, when you look at the different rights or permissions that are asked, even across the platforms, iOS and Android. You know, Android apps tend to ask for everything. IOS, because of the App Store and the overruling of the Apple god, they don’t ask as much. But one of the things that you have to realize, that when you opt in or you sign up with Google, you’re giving Google access to all of your information — not just the app maker, but Google as well. So, critical things there to think about. We do live in a different world. So, you know, when you’re sharing that information, you’re sharing it with a broader audience than you might think.

Steven: Yeah. That’s a good point.

Paul: You’re not only giving the app the ability to authenticate you, but you’re giving Google whatever information that app shares with Google. So, you know, Google knows everything. We’re just giving them more and more and more and more and more and more. So, for example, let’s talk about this.

There are going to be trends that emerge from your playing this game. And Google can predict where you are, you know. And who you’re with.

Steven: That’s a good point.

Paul: You know, so now we have clustering. You know, we have the fact that Steve and Bob tend to go on Thursday afternoon for a walk in this area. Now, you know, who can do good or bad with that? You know, I mean, Google with use it, I’m sure, to sell advertising locally. You know, real, brick-and-mortar advertising. So, we know that there’s this many people walking by this spot. This is a good place to put an ad, as opposed to one street over where they traditionally sold the ads, but they don’t… Nobody walks by that, especially for urban settings.

So, this big data, again, when it’s… When big data is used in a non-threatening way, it’s a good thing. You know, we’ve talked about the fact that, if, as advertising, matures, let’s say that you’re…we have digital advertising in the future. So, when you’re walking by it’s going to show you ads that are relevant to you. Same thing with the radio and things like that. So, as I express myself in the real world, I give Google more opportunities to target me, because now I know where you are. And so I can change the billboard there to be… Oh, I’ve got 10 people, and they’re all interested in the Celtics in Boston. I can put a Celtics ad up. And I can sell that to them to say these are some people that are looking at it.

Steven: Yeah. Going even further than big data, maybe toward the conspiracy theory realms, we’ve got a couple of articles already that have come out saying, you know, is Pokemon Go basically a way to get big brother everywhere now that we’ve got people literally sticking their cameras in places and they’ve got all your geospatial data. Even your Pokemon are tagged as to where they’re caught. So, you don’t even have to be watching live. You could just see where people trend to be.

One person was saying, you know… This is a really funny, interesting idea. A user said, “What if that local church is a mosque?” — Talking about an area where Pokemon might be — “they suspect terrorist activity and they want photos of it or photos of the cars around it and their plates or photos of the people coming in and out. Meaning, that should the director of the FBI need eyes somewhere, all he has to do is tell the game to stick a Pikachu in the room, and some unassuming schlub will send him a photo in no time.

Paul: Yeah. Absolutely. And there’s some implicit walls built between private and public. So, that may be difficult to happen in the open, but it can happen on the backend, or sly, if you will. But also it gives corporations information that government might not be able to have because of the laws. So, it’s going to be fascinating. One of the things that, you know, there’s an article out that talks about a company called In-Q-tel, and they were interested… We had talked to them about one of the companies I had, about them buying some of the technology. And these are CIA, that type of NSA, CIA people. It is a government organization. And, you know, this is the kind of stuff that makes them salivate, you know. This is just have interesting stuff.

To your statement, to say, what about that, or what the article was asking, that is a reality right now that could be happening right now. The only thing that’s a control there is can the agency, the government agency, delegate Pokemon to say, “Put something here.” There’s the only thing that has to happen. And I would imagine they’d find a way to do that pretty easily. It wouldn’t be difficult for us to probably figure out how to do that from social engineering and all sorts of stuff.

Steven: That’s a good point. Yeah, so maybe taking a step back and just talking about the issue of privacy as a whole, what are maybe some practical steps listeners could take to prevent this kind of collection or to be careful with it at least?

Paul: There isn’t. There isn’t anything you can do. I mean, you’re giving, you’re giving your presence and tying it to a geolocation, you’re also giving your friends- I can correlate that. So, if I don’t like people that like you. So, if want to know who’s Steve’s friends are, this is going to give it to me. And it’s going to tell me where they are all the time. And that’s reality. Anybody can say, “Oh, we’re not using it for that.” But they have it all stored. It’s all there, you know.

It would be interesting to see what their data anonymizing policy is. But fundamentally, it has to be tied to you, and you can go back right now, I think, and see where you picked up every, every Pokemon.

Steven: Yes. Correct.

Paul: So, alright. I gotta take, I gotta slice that whole feature set out to make it, you know, to make it privacy aware. I don’t think that’s going to happen.

What’s fascinating here is that, you know, Nielsen Rating Company has always rated TV shows for how popular they were. And they went through a lot of trouble to have a person used to fill out a diary. They would actually write down or check off what they watched. And they would say, “How many people were in the room?” And that worked for a long time. Now then, they moved to an electronic device which would monitor who watched what. I don’t believe it got down to the who, but that there were people in the room, and it was watching a TV, as opposed to an empty room.

Now, we have this… One of the things that the internet is really great, and it’s the Holy Grail for advertising is, if I’m browsing the web, and I’m logged into Google, Google knows who I am, and they can push ads to me that I’m interested in. This does it even better. I mean, the cellphone, you know, if you think about it, the smartphone could be a clandestine attempt to just be about to enable tracking of individuals. That’s really, you know, that’s really what it’s really well, is a byproduct of its design, at doing.

So, my son has his own cellphone. My daughter has her own cellphone, so that cellphone is inextricably bound to that person. So, you know, it’s unusual that we’re without our phones. That’s a notion of the past. You always have it with you. So, understand that just by using those devices, you’re giving that information away.

So, let’s say you have a Gmail account. It’s logged in to your phone. And you, Steve, has a Gmail account. Google, can tell that we’re this close to each other, you know. That we’re in the same room. So, this is just another example of that. It’s not like, “One, two, run,” and say, “Oh, my gosh, I can’t use a phone from now on.” That, that ship has sailed, I guess.

Steven: Wow. I know we had mentioned earlier about business possibilities, you know. Inventions don’t require brand new things. Sometimes they require just putting things that exist together, and Pokemon Go is an example of that on a very large scale.

Possibly another example is learning to test or dry run ideas before they actually happen. And there’s a bit of a theory going on right now. I don’t know if you saw the April 2014. It was the April Fool’s Day “prank” of Google, was actually very similar to the Pokemon Go idea. It was they placed Pokémon on Google maps all around the world. And I don’t think you actually traveled. You just looked at your map, as far as I remember. But you could actually, if you found enough, you could send it into Google and say, “I found these 25,” and Google sent you a certificate and said, “Dear Pokemon master, congratulations.”

And so productivity dropped strongly that first week of April. No… But that seems like- there’s a theory going around now. They started development in early 2014 of this game. And it’s kind of oblique. The game uses the Google maps’ API system. And Niantec, which is the developers of the game, they used to be part of Google. And so, there’s all this…

Paul: Conspiracy theory?

Steven: It’s literally just missing the brick that would say, “Oh, yeah. We used this as a dry run.” I don’t know if you have any thoughts about that.

Paul: Well, it could be. I think that the most difficult thing in the web… I’m reading a great book which we’re going to do a special podcast on this book coming up. But it’s about how we design and the way we think. And it’s a lot of the psychology behind that. And as I’m reading through it, there’s all these techniques to talk about trigger points or calls to action or this or that or all these different things. But the thing we don’t know is what people will like. And how we can get them to share it in a viral way. That’s what we can’t predict.

So, you know, they may have done this to see if there was any traction at all there. But it would be very interesting for me to see the demographics on how the uptake came. So, in other words, why did it break through the gamers, you know, and not just stay in the gamers’ space.

Any business you’re going to launch, whether it be a website, a product, or whatever, is going to be successful based on the number of people that know about it and choose to take an action about it. And that’s really the Holy Grail, is trying to get people to be aware of it, and then to make an action, a commitment. What’s interesting, is there’s a group of people called Foursquare which are kicking themselves right now.

Steven: That’s a good point.

Paul: They have been working on this for five, six years. And this thing just came out and took it away from them. I mean, now they could… You, they could literally put Pokemon and Yelp into this and sell, socialize it around Pokemon. And that is highly leveragable.

© 2025 Paul Parisi

Theme by Anders NorénUp ↑