[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?