“Pokemon GO” has only been out for a few weeks, but the game has already taken the market by storm. It’s huge everywhere it’s available, and it looks like it will only keep getting bigger over the next few months. Even if the developers completely ceased support right now (which they obviously won’t), the game should still be able to live for a good while with just the content it has right now.
It’s obvious that other publishers have been keeping an eye on the game’s progress since day 1, and so far Ubisoft are the first to confirm that they are working on an Augmented Reality game of their own. We have no details about the actual game right now, but considering the diverse and popular intellectual properties Ubisoft have available, there are numerous possibilities.
And that’s just the beginning, according to many – it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing similar games from other major publishers. Various franchises are just ripe for the taking in this fresh new market, from “Star Wars” and “X-Men” to all sorts of TV shows. Players seem full of ideas on how AR can be implemented for a more exciting experience, and we’re likely going to see various different takes on the basic idea in the future.
For example, some have suggested that TV shows could use AR games to expand their stories and give an even richer experience to their audiences. Having to complete a task between episodes to get a hint about what’s coming up could improve a show’s popularity quite a bit.
“Pokemon GO” also proved something that many people already knew to be true in one way or another – that brand name matters a lot. Niantic, the developers of the game, already have experience with AR games. In fact, the locations in “Pokemon GO” are all based on a previous title by the same company, called “Ingress”.
But while “Ingress” is a much more mature game, with lots of extra features compared to “Pokemon GO” and a much more expansive experience, it never managed to reach the level of popularity and hype that its spiritual successor is enjoying. It took Niantic years to perfect the formula of “Ingress”, and yet the very first day of “Pokemon GO” on the market already saw it performing unbelievably better.
That’s okay though – at least “Ingress” allowed the company to develop their next game much more easily, as they already had a lot of information about interesting locations all over the world. They actually just had to plug that into “Pokemon GO” and were all set, so one could say that “Ingress” helped pave the way for the current game much more significantly than just giving the original idea and inspiration. Plus, the developers have surely honed their skills quite a lot in the course of developing “Ingress”.
It will definitely be interesting to see where this trend goes over the next few months. “Pokemon GO” is enjoying a huge audience right now, with millions of players having fun with it all over the world. It also has the special ability to bring people together in real life, helping gamers socialize and find new friends who enjoy the same things. This is truly a new era of gaming, and we might be witnessing the birth of a major new craze.