[itcmcgrath]

Yes, and I can tell you even though I spend every day working with extremely large scale systems I wouldn't have told them "you should expect 10x larger", yet alone 50x. Their initial estimates would still have been an very large launch.

The Niantic team did incredible things given the instant historic success that became Pokemon Go.

[devilsavocado]

Sorry if I implied you did something wrong, not my intention at all. I'm just curious how someone comes up with an estimation at all for a game that doesn't have pre-orders, and where similar games don't already exist.

[itcmcgrath]

They ran a closed beta.

[BinaryIdiot]

> Yes, and I can tell you even though I spend every day working with extremely large scale systems I wouldn't have told them "you should expect 10x larger", yet alone 50x. Their initial estimates would still have been an very large launch.

The generic 1X, 5X and 50X are hard to understand in this context I think. Pokemon is so popular it's very difficult in imaging what the real numbers actually are. For instance on launch day in America and Asia I would have expected insane numbers (many hundreds of million).

I also feel like the 1X, 5X and 50X number placeholders are useless in this conversation because it doesn't give a sense of scale at all.

[itcmcgrath]

"For instance on launch day in America and Asia I would have expected insane numbers (many hundreds of million)."

Given no app had ever done this in history over the first few weeks, yet alone on launch day with no marketing, I doubt it.

[BinaryIdiot]

There was no marketing? It was being talked about everywhere. If they didn't spend any money on marketing then good for them!

But in all seriousness this is Pokemon; they sold over 3 million copies of a remake of a game on a niche portable console in just 3 days; elevating its brand to an open platform for FREE that can be downloaded and installed on theoretically, what, a billion or more devices? Seems incredibly doable for Pokemon. Few other brands could do the same. Even Mario wouldn't be able to come close to competing with Pokemon's brand power.

I would be very interested in the real numbers :)

[itcmcgrath]

How about this - Pokemon search trend for the last 5 years: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=pokemon

If this doesn't clearly show how crazy this growth was compared to what anyone was expecting, I'm not sure we're operating in the same plane.

[BinaryIdiot]

I don't see how that data couldn't be used to argue either of our points (in fact I feel like you could make a strong case for my previous post using this very link). Ultimately though this conversation is a bit vapid without actual numbers which is a bit of a disappointment. Oh well.

[alasdair_]

The US has roughly 330 million people in it.

"Many hundreds of millions" implies at least three of them.

I would not expect the entire population of the US to be playing on day one, especially the roughly 50% of them that don't even own a phone.

[BinaryIdiot]

I'm not sure I follow. Why are you only focusing on the US? This was launched in many countries. Granted not at the same time but that's why I said take the aggregate of each launch day.

[alasdair_]

I took "on launch day in America" to mean the US (since no other part of the Americas was launched on that day).

[BinaryIdiot]

You dropped the "Asia" from that. "America and Asia". Also looks like I forgot to mention the other regions in this comment (mentioned it in another one).

Sigh. This would have been easier if we had real numbers. Let us all test our hypothesis. Oh well.

[hexane360]

Maybe there were just a lot of sockpuppet users. :P