Perhaps the only people surprised at the success of Pokémon Go were the people making it.
Developer Niantic had projections for what the server load would be for the game at launch. A 'worst case' estimate - accounting for the fact it was releasing a much-hyped spinoff from a beloved franchise in its 20th anniversary year - was that demand might hit five times the volume of the team's target uptake.
The reality was an astounding 50 times the expected traffic, within 24 hours of launch. The result? Downed servers and a frustrating experience for players, just as Pokémon Go was exploding into an undeniable summer phenomenon.
"The downside is that it was so positively received, it did cause us problems," Mike Quigley, Niantic's chief marketing officer, tells WIRED. "Probably no regrets, because we didn't forecast it to have that kind of success, but in hindsight, if we could have anticipated that, then delaying [the launch] a few weeks knowing it would have avoided those server outages, of course we would have wanted to do that. No one saw that coming, we admit that."
WIRED crossed paths with Quigley as he passed through London on the way to Portugal's Web Summit, before heading to Rome for the fourth anniversary celebrations of Niantic's other, longer-running augmented reality game Ingress. An event called Via Noir will welcome more than 4,000 players to the streets of the Italian capital to cap off the sci-fi game's year.
"If you think about Ingress and the history there - it celebrates its fourth anniversary on 15th November - there's a lot of learning where we realised that we're more like an MMO than a classic mobile free-to-play game," Quigley explains. "Knowing that we were taking the long view, and knowing the feedback we got from the Pokémon Go field tests in the spring, we were feeling pretty good actually about the initial feature set and mechanics."
Since launch, Pokémon Go has gone from strength to strength, and recently launched its first event. The Halloween update - the first of what Niantic has planned for live events in the game - saw players earn more candy for in-game actions, used to evolve their Pokémon. Ghost-type and other creepy Pokémon appeared more regularly, too.
The spooky limited time event was a hit, bringing players back to the game. Running from 26 October-1 November, Niantic saw daily active users spike 13.2 per cent globally. The effect was magnified in the US, where nationally the figure rose by 19.2 per cent.
The Halloween event also saw more than 1.3 billion of the increased-frequency Pokémon caught by players, with Gastly being captured the most. Golbat was the most elusive - less than two per cent of captures during the week, which is odd considering Zubat, its unevolved form, is one of Pokémon Go's more common creatures.
Read more: Pokémon Go update hints at the arrival of 100 new Pokémon – including Ditto
Following Halloween, the most recent update has already seen its code pored over by eager fans, revealing placeholder spots for the next 100 Pokémon (matching those introduced in the second generation core titles, [i]Pokémon Gold and Silver[/link]) and the so-far missing Ditto. Such teardowns are no surprise though, more an inevitability of the digital age and a vociferous fanbase.
"We're familiar with that [activity] from working on Ingress, and it's happened before on Pokémon Go," Quigley says. "The dev team has to make decisions on how they're going to get things into builds and test things."
"We're not announcing anything around Gold and Silver or Ditto or anything, but hopefully what people have seen after the craziness of the summer is that the dust has settled," he adds. "We're starting to add new features big and small to the game - buddy Pokémon, daily bonuses, the Halloween promotion. The community knows the IP as well as anyone, so we'll let them speculate and hopefully when the day does come, we meet expectations."
One area Pokémon Go has vastly exceeded expectations is in revenue. The game is regularly a top-grossing app for both Android and iOS, bringing in millions. It does this through sales of optional in-game items such as incubators to hatch Pokémon eggs quicker or lures to attract rarer Pokémon, but Quigley says it was important Niantic made money without exploiting players.
"This may sound crazy just because of our time as top-grossing, but honestly monetisation was not the focus. It was about the marathon not the sprint," he says. "The Pokémon Company, they've built a beloved brand with a lot of passionate players who have big expectations, so from their standpoint and ours as a core product experience, neither of us wanted users to feel fleeced."
"One of the things that maybe sends a signal with what we did with Pokémon Go, as far as not getting too aggressive with in-app purchases, is that with Ingress we didn't even introduce IAP until the end of the third year. We were focused on core game mechanics, learning things on the technical side, the ops and customer support side, the community and marketing side."
Instead of microtransactions, Ingress was monetised first through sponsored locations, where partner companies would pay for their real-world locations to be places in the game.
"Some early partners [wanted to get involved] and it felt like a more natural way to monetise," Quigley says. "We're encouraging people to get out and about in their neighborhoods, their cities, their communites - what more natural way to integrate someone into the game than to have these paid sponsor locations that are interleaved among the other locations?"
Read more: Pokémon Go's first sponsored location will be McDonald's - in Japan
The same concept is set to come to Pokémon Go in future (with McDonalds in Japan already lined up), but for now Quigley is pleased with how players are choosing to pay for the game.
"We're happy with the initial offering; we were conscious of making sure people didn't feel they had to go and make a purchase, but we're also pleased with the fact that approach seems to have served us well. No one's saying 'oh, it's pay to win', which is good," he says.
"We're hearing anecdotal stories from other publishers there was kind of an 'all boats rise' thing happening as well - it wasn't cannibalising," Quigley adds of the game's effect on the mobile gaming sector. "That can happen a lot in the traditional games space, where it's a zero sum game, but we didn't really see that. For us, that's good - we want the whole ecosystem to be successful."
Quite aside from the money, Pokémon Go has also been successful in engaging its players imaginations, resulting in a surge of creativity from fans. Almost immediately after the three Team Leaders in Go - Mystic's Blanche, Valor's Candela, and Instinct's Spark - were revealed, players had created mountains of fanfic, art, and even beautiful comics crafting a homespun narrative around a game that functionally has no story.
"I think that speaks to the power of the Pokémon brand," Quigley says. "24 hours after we did our San Diego Comic Con session in July, there was already a ton of fanfic that had emerged, and that's only gotten broader and bigger."
Could any of that art and storytelling influence the games themselves, and see the characters and setting fleshed out?
"There could be an opportunity there for us to expand canon," Quigley admits, "but that's ultimately something we've got to work out with Pokémon Company. It's fun to see the passion of the fans filling in the gaps and creating backstory to help enhance what we're building on the gameplay side."
The success of Pokémon Go has also bolstered the core Pokémon games. Spring boarding off the back of the mobile game's dominance of the summer, the Nintendo 3DS' upcoming Pokémon Sun and Moon has become Nintendo's most pre-ordered game ever.
"What we're happy about is that in the 20th anniversary, we've played a role in helping overall; building Pokémon affinity," says Quigley. "We're very close with those guys and know how important we are to them but also know they've got other things. As long as those things are complementing each other, I'm sure there are some halo effects."
But could the two games more directly integrate? Could future updates see, perhaps, players being able to transfer Pokémon caught in the real world into the 3DS games?
Read more: Pokemon's Junichi Masuda: 'We weren’t explicitly targeting children'
"There's nothing specific to speak to on that yet, but what I would say is Masuda-san from Game Freak and Mr Ishihara, and our CEO John Hanke, have mentioned that could be an area for us to explore down the road," Quigley reveals.
"We're only month four of Pokémon Go, so still early days for us to get our foundation underneath us, but I think the leaders of the companies acknowledge that there are opportunities there and when the time comes I'm sure they would follow up on that," he continues. "That has been referenced early on in the relationship, and I think it's something we hope that we can get to."
The next step for Pokémon Go is to expand the new Nearby and Sightings features, which help players track down where Pokémon are in the world around them. Having been in testing exclusively in San Francisco since August, Niantic just began expanding it to other US cities, with more locations and eventually a global release to follow.
"I think it'll be analogous to the country rollout," says Quigley of Nearby's expansion. "Of course, we want a global release for the game and we got a lot done over the summer, but we still have a lot of countries to launch in."
"I think the same thing for Nearby - we're going to try to roll it out in a responsible way, get user feedback, make sure it's working to a place where the players are happy, and then figure out a way to try to scale it and broaden it in as quick of a timeline as we can. We know that if fans love it, and if we can roll it out sooner, we will."
Going forward, Niantic plans to continue supporting both Pokémon Go and Ingress ("Obviously, Pokémon Go publicly is getting a lot of the attention because it's the new thing", Quigley says), and build on the fundamentals of both titles.
"To have had the player response that we've got is very humbling, exciting. It's lead to a lot of sleep deprivation, but overall, it's been a crazy year for us, a good year, and we're just getting started."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
