On July 6, a Virtual Blizzard hit globally and of course, a new sensation that smashed all the mobile gaming download records is none other than Pokemon Go. A word became viral and everyone playing the game with a new idea- Augmented reality (AR) trending in the daylights hours of the summer season. Pokemon; the talk of the town, the game of the year to phrase a few is definitely a new flavor among all gaming apps. Within 13 hours the game reaches the highest grossing app chart (App store and Google playstore) in US crossing over 15 million download within a week and daily users for this app is more than Facebook and Twitter, statistics says. This success of Pokemon accelerates the Niantic to implement the new technology in gaming which will take the game to next level.
Behind the scenes of Pokemon Go – An untold 20 years of Voyage
There is no such terminology called as instant success, even Edison had 1000+ unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. The same applied to John Hanke as well, the creator of Pokémon Go.
It’s all started in 1996 when John Co came up with multiplayer online game “Meridian 59” and he moved on to his next step of mapping the world. He launched “Keyhole” linking maps with aerial photography, and ended up on the very first, 3D aerial map linking GPS of the world via online. This so-called Keyhole was bought by Google and finally turned up as “Google Earth”. For four years (2004-2010) John headed Google GEO team focusing mainly on online games based on GPS and also created Google maps and Google street view. In 2010, John launched Niantic Lab funded by Google to create GPS-based games and in 2012 “Ingress” first GEO based game created by John at Niantic. John’s idea of Pokemon real game came into action when Google and Pokemon company teams up for April fool’s day joke, which allowed the end users to find the Pokemon creatures on Google maps. He planned to build Pokémon Go and raises $25M from Google, Nintendo, the Pokémon Company and other investors between Dec 2015 to Feb 2016 to grow a team of 40+ to release Pokémon Go on the same year. The big day finally came for John on July’ 16 where the game went viral and Nintendo’s share was raised to $12Billion and $2Million on app purchase on the same day creating a history.
Finally a Financial Breakthrough:
Pokémon Go is a huge hit capturing not only the people minds but so called a commercial revolution. The monster game is owned by both Niantic Labs and The Pokemon company, yet Nintendo who owns 32 percent of shares doubled their profit margin between $US 20Billion and $42 billion, source says. And now, Nintendo’s shares is flying high having a net worth more than Sony and retaining #1 in revenue grossing charts @ U.S. would add up to 15 percent to their net profits and #5 ranking in Japan profiting by up to 10 percent.
Statistics Overview:
The Pokemon go daily usage time as on 8th July was 33 minutes and 20 Seconds, which is more than average day users on Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter. Active users per day were estimated as 19 million (as on July 8) which enormously raised up to 45 million as on Aug’ 16 and it crashed all the records made by candy crush soda saga and Clash Royale. Yet the sad news is it was not released on Pokemon’s home country- Japan due to some issues. But Nintendo and Niantic were in full swing to release soon.
Sony and Microsoft- Strategy went wrong??
Of course, PS4 and Xbox were ruling the gaming arena since 2011 in sales and profit thereby taking the shares away from Nintendo where their sales units were down to 11.6
million. This made the two legends to invest more and more in console gaming industry, nevertheless, the PC games were not reached everyone in recent years. They didn’t analyze the recent market trends on gaming since the focus is extremely moved on to Mobile gaming rather than PCs. These Gladiators realized the real trendsetter when Candy crush launched smashing all records in terms of revenue and acknowledged the power of mobile apps.And now Nintendo done a Reverse engineering and moved one step ahead, i.e. instead of playing the game between man to mobile, they came out with the game plan of bringing people together with elements comprising social media. That’s how they launched Pokemon Go. Just like the Facebook, they came up with a financial idea, “FREE APP” and that made the game most successful ever in the Gaming industry. Nintendo gave the people not only the game but also the trending technology “Augmented Reality” and now it became a user-friendly tech. This is the real achievement than Billion dollars.
