Pokemon Go: One Month In

Today marks the one month anniversary of Pokemon Go, the world’s biggest mobile game. It’s been a crazy month, filled with excitement, exploration, and more than a little drama. Now the game has had some time to settle, let’s take a look at what works, what doesn’t, and what still needs improved upon in Pokemon Go.

A Perfect Introduction to the World of Pokemon

At its core, Pokemon Go is an inventive and intuitive introduction to the world of Pokemon. While many fans were hoping for a more traditional Pokemon game, Pokemon Go is a fantastic blend of real world exploration and traditional Pokemon elements. In particular, it was a wise move to make the main focus of the game “catching them all” as opposed to competitive battling. While battling at gyms can be fun, it’s a lot more satisfying to finally catch a Lapras or evolve your Charmander all the way to a Charizard. 

Pokemon Go also used nostalgia to their advantage by only having the original 150 Pokemon in the game. Catching 150 Pokemon doesn’t feel like an unachievable task, and many lapsed fans still remember most (if not all) of the Pokemon from the original games. It also provided the Pokemon Company with a big boost, as millions of Pokemon Go players immediately started snatching up whatever Pokemon merchandise they could find. From PokeBall-shaped battery chargers to Spotify playlists featuring classic Pokemon anime songs, Pokemon Go breathed new life into a gaming franchise that never really went away. 

Imperfect and Rushed

When Nintendo announced at E3 that the Pokemon Go Plus periphery device would be released in July, Niantic was officially placed “on the clock” to get Pokemon Go out in a timely fashion. Unfortunately, Pokemon Go could have benefited from a few more weeks/months of beta testing to prevent the dozens of bugs and glitches fans have been dealing with since Day 1 of release.

From frequent server crashes to a broken tracker system, Pokemon Go was a flawed products since its release and Niantic Labs quickly burned up all the goodwill from the game’s large fanbase. Expectations were high for Pokemon Go, perhaps unreasonably so, and Niantic didn’t have the manpower or resources to put out a better version of the game at release. 

In Niantic’s defense, I don’t think anyone expected Pokemon Go to do quite this well in its first month. Traditionally, mobile games don’t hit peak traffic levels until months after its release, which gives developers time to slowly add features and additional server capacity. Pokemon Go bucking these trends exacerbated the game’s problems.

On the plus side, it seems like Niantic now has its feet under them. There hasn’t been a major server crash in weeks and the game is out in most major countries, save for Russia, China, and Asia. Niantic has also realized that they need to be more proactive in communicating to their fanbase, and their recent explanations should help rebuild much of the goodwill lost during the first month.

Pokemon Go is positioned well for the future and those that are still playing the game will probably stick with it as Niantic begins to add more features. 

Finding A Place in the World

One of the most fascinating things about Pokemon Go was how the world reacted to the game. Pokemon Go was an honest to goodness paradigm changer, a game that made sizable impacts on entire communities and societies.

From businesses scrambling to find ways to profit off of Pokemon Go to police departments reacting to Pokemon Go related crimes and the influx of players loitering at public places at all hours of the day, Pokemon Go forced people to reexamine how they thought about video games. No longer were gamers confined to their couches, they were in parks, on buses, and suddenly interacting with the rest of the world. 

Although plenty of businesses and companies embraced Pokemon Go, not everyone reacted positively to the game. For whatever reason, Pokemon Go caused plenty of people to lose their common sense, lead to plenty of accidents and anger. It didn’t help that Niantic didn’t have the resources to immediately address some of these issues, leading to many getting the wrong idea about the game. 

Pokemon Go doesn’t cause trespassing, but in hindsight Niantic probably should have vetted their PokeStops a little more thoroughly. They could have avoided at least one lawsuit and plenty of bad PR that way. 

What Still Needs to Be Fixed

With the game’s worldwide rollout nearing completion, Pokemon Go still has two major problems that need to be addressed. First and foremost is adding a functional tracking system, which most fans thought was one of the best parts of the game. Pokemon Go is still fun, but the tracker system is key to the whole idea of “real world exploration” that the game is supposedly about. I think Niantic recognizes the importance of the tracking system to the game’s success and it’s likely that bringing back the tracker will immediately lead to a uptick in gameplay.

The other problem that still needs to be addressed is the rampant cheating that has locked out most normal players from jumping into the competitive gym scene. Frankly, it’s unacceptable that minutes after the game went live in South America, every gym on the continent was seemingly filled with high CP Dragonites owned by Level 35 trainers. Pokemon Go needs to quickly ban the thousands of spoofed accounts or risk the bulk of the fanbase giving up on capturing gyms all together. 

What Happens Next

Niantic has stated repeatedly that their immediate goal is to complete Pokemon Go‘s worldwide rollout. Once they finish the game’s release, Niantic needs to move quickly to keep the fanbase interested in the game. The easiest way (in my opinion) is to announce the first Pokemon Go event, as players really want to know how to get their hands on one of the Legendary Pokemon. At the very least, Niantic should announce where and when the first of these events will take place sometime in the next month, because that’s a guaranteed way to build a new wave of excitement for the game. 

If the rumors are correct, trading has already been coded into Pokemon Go, which should also encourage some level of community building among players. Hopefully, Niantic will introduce other new features on a monthly basis, to build on the game’s strong foundation. 

My other hope is that Niantic doesn’t wait too long to pull the trigger on adding more Pokemon to the game. There’s a persistent rumor that Pokemon Go will add Johto Pokemon (from Pokemon Silver and Gold) sometime this winter, but I wonder if that’s almost too much time to wait. After all, many players have 70-100 Pokemon after just one month of playing Pokemon Go, so there’s a risk that players will get bored if they don’t have more Pokemon to collect. 

If the first month of Pokemon Go was about introducing the world to the game, the next month should be about keeping the world talking about Pokemon and preventing it from becoming a passing fad.