[MBCook]

That shows their estimates were terrible.

The article says (in one of the only bits of real information) that they blasted past their estimates with only Australia and NZ just 15m after launch.

Whoever came up with those numbers must have had some serious methodology flaws. I know they couldn't predict that it would become the biggest online game ever for a while, but the initial demand prediction was clearly way off even before it started growing like a rocket.

[KirinDave]

No offense, but your comments are somewhat outrageous to me. I've been on the receiving end of one of those graphs (different scale) because suddenly things happen (we were placed above the apple logo as a feature with no warning AS WE LAUNCHED).

And you're sitting there as the engineering lead or staff going, "How do I even feel about this? Fortunately I have no time to feel because I am off to fight fires." I didn't go home for 2 days, I worked 82 hours that week and >70 the next.

Complaining that the estimates are bad for a product that literally broke everything we know about how to build a successful mobile game and has scaled to a truly unprecedented level is meaningless. Obviously no one expected this. Obviously the engineers wouldn't have wanted it. Obviously the world will respond the way it will to our work.

Show some compassion. But also some humility. None of us are qualified to make projections in the face of phenomena like this.

[MBCook]

> Show some compassion. But also some humility. None of us are qualified to make projections in the face of phenomena like this.

You can't predict it will be the biggest game ever, that's not possible. But I feel like their initial estimates were still too low and you could predict it would have been higher. I don't know if it was based on how well Ingres did but...

Pokemon is a huge property. It's had tons of games, movies, sleeping bags, an incredibly successful trading card game, etc. Just having the Pokemon brand on something makes it VERY big.

In the game, you live out the Pokemon dream. This isn't just Pokemon Puzzle League. This isn't Pokemon Mystery Dungeon where you navigate cute little Pokemon around and play a top-down rogue like. You FIND AND CATCH Pokemon in the wild. It's exactly what Ash did in the TV show or comics.

Also, Pokemon are cute as hell. That plus the novelty of the AR stuff meant this had a lot of potential. "Look, I found a cute Eevee over here on my potted plant!" Those pictures were EVERYWHERE. That's tons of viral advertising.

But there is also the in-person effect. You want to compare what Pokemon you have with other people, and that encourages you to get your friends into it. But people were walking outside with their phones playing the game, and they quickly got spotted by people asking "What are you doing?"

All these things make it clear to me the this game had a high chance of success.

There's no way to know it would go to 50x what they guessed or would top the charts. Given their numbers I wonder if the expected should have been closer to 7x and the worst case at 20-25x.

The popularity they got would have taken basically anyone down. That was going to happen. I'm just surprised the estimates weren't much higher.

[KirinDave]

> Given their numbers I wonder if the expected should have been closer to 7x and the worst case at 20-25x.

What numbers? We know that their estimates and their realities were quite different, but not knowing the real numbers we have no way of even beginning to judge what's reasonable and unreasonable here. For all we know, they modeled directly after the most successful game in the Android market at that date as a baseline and then said, "At the worst case we'd expect 5x THAT."

You can write a ton of paragraphs about how cute Pokemon are, but the truth is that the Pokemon AR game was a massive risk. AR games have had extremely limited update. It seems incredibly unreasonable for me to expect that those folks should have realized apriori that they were about to release the most popular mobile game ever created.

I, for one, will not throw stones. I don't get why you feel the need to assert that you (or anyone) could have done a better job by setting a 20x or 25x target. Or that you could have not only forseen it was necessary, but convince everyone around you that the capex was justified.

Why are you so keen on assigning blame and shame in this scenario? Some of our peers made history. Can we be happy for them for 6 months before immediately backseat driving about how much better we all are in our armchairs?

[bduerst]

>That shows their estimates were terrible.

Pokemon Go became the most-downloaded app in history within the first few days.

Are you saying that's the bar that people should estimate at launch?

[kmm]

It shows that they were over their worst estimate total volume in one day. Were they really expecting less than a few million user-days in total?

[bduerst]

From the article, it seems like a few million users/day is a typical expectation, but record-breaking isn't.

>Throughout my career as an engineer, I’ve had a hand in numerous product launches that grew to millions of users. User adoption typically happens gradually over several months, with new features and architectural changes scheduled over relatively long periods of time.

[jandrese]

It's hard to estimate with no data. Nintendo had never released any other mobile games and the few NES/SNES ports had modest sales (at admittedly high price points for mobile).

When it comes down to it, the game is closer to a fitness app than a Pokemon game and can be described as bare bones. The fancy accessory wasn't even available at launch. Many of the players are people who have not bought a Pokemon game in over a decade, or ever in some cases.

If there is one area I can solidly criticize Niantic for it is rushing the other region releases so quickly. It's clear the servers were already badly overloaded and they just started adding countries left and right. I know it sucks for people who live in those countries to have to sit out while the rest of the world is having fun, but it's really not much more fun to sit at the eternal loading screen because the backend is entirely on fire.

[petters]

No, it shows that successes like these are impossible to predict.

[BinaryIdiot]

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted into oblivion; you are completely correct. Yes, to address the other points raised, it's difficult to predict how popular something unreleased will be. But this is Pokemon. Their last game release, which is limited to the niche Nintendo 3DS console, sold over 3 million copies in just 3 days. And this was the Omega / Alpha games which were essentially just remakes of older games.

A mobile game, available to be downloaded onto hundreds of millions of phones, that is also FREE? I feel like they broke 100 million in the first day at the latest (counting totals from each region's first day). It wouldn't surprise me if it's significantly higher than that.

Media, users; everyone has been BEGGING Nintendo to release IP to mobile devices but they have kept it locked up in their own hardware. If no one had even a rough idea of the possible popularity they most certainly had a very, very wrong methodology.