If you want to talk about it in the city recently, it must be “Pokemon Go”, there is no one.
Pokemon Go is the posthumous work of the late Nintendo President Satoshi Iwata, and the first mobile game in Nintendo’s 127-year history. Before it was released, Nintendo had already fallen into a sales slump, and since 2010, it has suffered its first loss in the past three decades.
On the one hand, the biggest reason is that Japanese game manufacturers are facing a big challenge. Compared with European and American manufacturers, both technology, capital and manpower are also obviously compared.
On the other hand, Nintendo has been reluctant to enter the mobile game market, which has become popular in recent years. Because Nintendo is not only a game production company, but also a hardware manufacturer and seller, if it enters the mobile phone market with its games, it will obviously affect the sales of its own handheld game console hardware, forming a situation where it will fight itself, and in the end it may not bring considerable profits.
Therefore, in Nintendo’s original plan for 2014, it was only hoped to use existing iOS and Android devices to promote the brand and launch demo versions of its classic games, while the unofficial version assumed that when players were attracted to the demo version, they would naturally spend money on consoles and games.
However, Nintendo probably didn’t expect that since the launch of “Pokemon Go”, it has quickly become the top three test sites in the United States, Australia and New Zealand for three consecutive days of App Store revenue, and the stock price of Nintendo, the game company that produced the game, has soared, gaining $9 billion in value in a few days. On top of that, the game attracted a lot of social media following, and Twitter topics doubled in just two days after the game’s launch.
So, what’s the magic of Pokemon Go that has become a sought-after game around the world?
Fulfill your childhood dreams
First of all, let’s understand the structure of the game. It is one of the few mobile games that combines fictional games with reality, and the main direction of the game is to capture and train the “Pokemon” in it. This game is highly integrated with the GPS positioning system, players must be equipped with mobile phones, constantly find and capture different Pokemon indoors and outdoors, and then through the player’s continuous walking, let the captured Pokemon grow.
The gameplay may seem unremarkable, but it fulfills the childhood dream of the first generation of Pokemon lovers to become a true Pokemon master. Everyone who loved Pokemon back then must have fantasized about becoming the protagonist of it, constantly adventuring and catching Pokemon.
Even though Nintendo has been releasing various related games for many years, players are still stuck in a fictional world and still have a sense of misplace, but this time in Pokemon Go, players have to capture pokemon according to the real geography of the local area, and they can also go to famous local places to challenge the gym (for example, one of the gyms in Hong Kong is in Times Square), which greatly increases the realism.
Moreover, the characteristics of wild Pokemon are closely related to their distribution location and terrain, for example, water Pokemon need to be caught by the sea; Grass and insect elves are usually encountered on land, and the sense of substitution is stronger.
Strong social potential
This game is not limited to catching pokemon, players can also buy virtual items with real money, and then set a PokeStop at a fixed location that is valid for 30 minutes, so that players in the real world can gather to enjoy their PokeStop. This LBS (Location Based Service) gameplay allows players to socialize not only with friends, but also with other strangers they meet in the place, showing strong social potential and social interaction.
Strong online communication
Due to the game’s incorporation of LBS features, it attracts many players, including celebrities from all over the world, KOLs (Key Opinion Leader) screenshots, and sharing their real-time results on social platforms. Fueled by celebrity, the game has proliferated even faster, with Pokemon Go garnering 32 million Google searches and 1.9 million Twitter threads within a few days of its launch.
Moreover, even in Hong Kong, many brands have taken advantage of this general trend to launch posts related to “Pokemon Go” on social platforms such as Facebook, such as the “Big Waster” Facebook page, the brand has attracted a lot of fans to share with the topic of subduing Big Waster, and the number of shares of this post alone has been more than 20 times that of ordinary posts. In such a strong atmosphere of communication, how can “Pokemon Go” not become popular?
Pokemon Go brings revelation and direction
The unprecedented success of Pokemon Go is a testament to the importance of the brand. In fact, there have been many similar examples of this combination of virtual and reality games in the past, but most of them were developed by some lesser-known game manufacturers, but the popularity of “Pokemon Go” is a reflection of Nintendo’s brand strength, which has gathered many fans around the world in the past few decades, so it is natural that this virtual reality game will be more accepted by this brand and more willing to learn this rather innovative way of playing.
This concept is similar to Apple’s original products. As we all know, the new products and inventions proposed by Apple, such as the touch screen of the iPhone, are actually not unprecedented new technologies, but after Apple’s investment and repackaging, because of Apple’s own brand effect, it brings customers confidence, so when it launches some newer or customers have never been exposed to technology, customer acceptance is often higher. A good example of this is Apple’s online payment service, which will attract more people to try using this technology when Apple Pay is built into the iPhone.
By extension, it is not difficult to predict that in the future, more and more large game manufacturers, especially Japanese game manufacturers, will follow Nintendo’s footsteps and step on the path of developing virtual reality. As mentioned above, Japanese game manufacturers are facing challenges from European and American game makers in all aspects, resulting in unsatisfactory sales. Comparatively speaking, the risk of making a mobile game of this type is relatively low in terms of money, time and manpower.
Therefore, it is expected that in the near future, many traditional Japanese large-scale game manufacturers, such as Capcom, will use their classic game capital to repackage into such virtual reality games, trying to carve out a new way for their existing brands.
However, it is worth noting that although Nintendo’s Pokemon Go has developed a major new business opportunity and seems to have opened a new blood path for many game manufacturers, it should not be forgotten that one of the characteristics of mobile games is that they tend to have a short life cycle, and even if the game can achieve huge popularity and huge profits in a short period of time, it remains to be seen whether such development can be used as a long-term development for Nintendo or other game manufacturers that follow the game to become a long-term economic pillar for the company.
Zhu Junchang
Director of You Find Ltd., Vice Chairman of the Digital Alliance
Wang Zhiheng
Assistant Lecturer, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, The University of Hong Kong
