The PokeMon Elephant in the Room

[MizEileen]

It's time to get serious. Some of us know something is up. Others are talking about the next update and event. Someone in the thread I linked to said something very cogent about the gym situation.

So let's get that elephant named and out in the open. Pokemon Go needs to make money, and I don't think the Poke Shop can do it. There are too many little kids playing (whose parents won't let them buy anything) and too many people like me who won't spend a dime.

So we all kind of know what is next. The only question is how Niantic can monetize Pokemon Go. That's a fancy word for using the game to make money, but Niantic is NOT in business for love and Google while not doing evil reaps profits from innovation and is a leader in getting eye-balls to sponsored links.

Pokemon Go's main customers are going to be companies wanting to purchase advertising. Our eyeballs and sore feet are for sale. Now, advertising clearly can disturb those of us lost in augmented reality, so Niantic/Google will have to make it look and feel as if we, the eyeballs, consent to and even welcome this intrustion. There is a history of this on the internet, with Neopets (Remember getting paid in points for not only watching but paying attention to commercials for something you would never in a hundred years actually purchase. Finding the games that asked you to do this was a hack of sorts and felt like an achievement). Then we have Spotify which asks you to watch a video for thirty minutes of commercial-free music.

Niantic is already setting up the architecture to make players advertising compliant with an interesting mix of abundance and scarcity.

There are plenty of creatures to hunt. Somehow one never has enough Poke Balls. Walk to the next stop is the answer, buy them in the store, or could there be something else? Remember you're always free to just walk around, hatch eggs. Eventually, you'll reach the next Poke stop. You can even turn off your vibration. How much discipline do you have? How strong is it on a good day or a bad day?

There are plenty of creatures to hunt, but they get monotonous. OK, Niantic increased biodiversity, but only to a point. Koffings and Magickarp are still as scarce as ever. Tauros and Bulbusars are more abundant, but in a few weeks, we can all devalue them because that is what happens to abundant creatures. Supply and demand happens.

Do you want a chance to hatch out something really rare? Well, watch this video for thirty free minutes of music... whoops wrong service, but Niantic will be ready with an offer to liven things up. Just remember you are free to see how each creature you catch becomes useful, and to select the strongest among them or a sentimental favorite. Do you have that sort of discipline? There are always outliers and you may or may not be one of them, and face it you're probably not one of them 24/7. 24/7 is a tall order.

Then there are gyms. You can fight your way in. I'm not sure how easy this is. I've never done it. It looks complicated, but if this game is as popular as I think, entry level gym slots are far fewer than the demand, and I would really prefer something else to do. "For three hundred Neopoints, answer the following questions about a Disney movie you would never in your right mind go to see..." Oops, wrong game, but you are always free just to walk around or fight your way into the gyms or write FanFic or draw your creature. Do you have the internal resources to learn something difficult or expend creative energy especially in an not socially validated activity? How strong are you 24/7?

I think ownership and outlet for expression is the scarcest Pokemon Go commodity. There are six outflits for your avatar. There are three or four face choices for each sex. You can't paint or dress up your favorite creatures. You can only give them a star. You can't upload textures or choose color from thousands of hues.

I can taste the temptation as I write this. Desire for ownership can easily turn into doing what it takes to obtain it. I would probably spend a few dollars to paint my Pokes or give my avatar a floral print blouse, but that may not be the sort of payment Niantic demands. "Thanks for watching. Now enjoy the music. " I I know it's Spotify, but substitute a custom Avatar shape and shirt or a chance to dye your Pidgeot's feathers navy blue. You can decide that you'll stake out your ownership with your drawing kit and GIMP. You can be an outlier.

You are free to say NO!. You are free to shout NO! from the rooftops every day of the week, but Niantic is free to keep plying you with offers every day of the week. The advertisers pay for them after all. More likely your "no" will turn into: "I'm not interested in that," again, and again, and again until...

And you are free to leave if it is too annoying, but if you get used to it as background noise or if you are really interested or consider it a good investment of your time... if your friends think it is OK and the alternatives are silly or magical thinking or little kid stuff.... you'll make what feels like a satisfying and rational choice. Or if you are an outlier, you will be a stick in the mud, and the game's social norms will move beneath your feet. You are always free to keep your balance on slippery ground. Go for it.

The only question is how soon and in what way will the manipulation begin. Feel free to discuss.

 

[VisualJae]

More microtransactions is the easy way for any mobile game to make money. Considering Pokémon GO already shattered records for mobile gaming profits, they have the luxury to play with ideas because people will feed them money regardless. It still makes millions of dollars per day as of now, even with a significantly dwindled player base compared to initial launch (this is 100% to be expected of any game).

In Japan GO is already linked to corporate sponsorships. Niantic at one point was open to PokéStop requests which is akin to sponsorships. I do not expect them to implement traditional advertising in GO. First of all, there's no room for it without interrupting player immersion which is the biggest deal for game designers. Should they incorporate advertising channels for brands, they already have their PokéStop system in place for that. Second of all, they're using the Pokémon IP. They don't own it. They only purchased the rights to use it. Anything that The Pokémon Company and Nintendo don't agree with from a brand perspective will be a no-go, and Nintendo especially is extremely strict on maintaining brand image and messaging.

 

[MizEileen]

What I do see with the new update roll out is not traditional advertising but an attempt to change game norms. Norms are not rules. Norms are not absolute. Eating turkey at Thanksgiving is a norm. Vegetarians break the norm. It is weird not illegal. For many people (but NOT my family) canned jellied cranberry sauce is the norm. In our family it was always whole berry (We offered the other only if there was someone who could not digest whole berry) and later a relish made from raw cranberries (even better!). My mother brought her world famous cranberry orange relish to her boyfriend's family who had the traditional jeillied stuff. They did not touch the relish. That's a norm hard at work.

With this new roll out, Niantic, is hard at work changing game norms. Instead of having to walk from stop to stop or along a route to find Pokes, they are there and waiting. There are more of them, more variety, and they are docile. Why travel when you can pick up Poke Balls and then shoot until they are gone. Yes, you can hatch eggs, but having critters close at hand makes walking look dull and onerous. You can also walk with your buddy, but there is huge temptation to go for the low hanging fruit.

Why has Niantic dis-incentivized the walking game? This is what I think: When I am walking a half a mile between PokeStops in various inner ring, suburban neighborhoods, I am NOT looking at my phone screen unless I feel a vibration, and if I am out of ammo, I turn off the vibration. With a good GPS lock, I am not paying that much attention to more than the surrounding real world landscape. What a waste of a good set of eyeballs. With less walking the eyeballs stay on the game screen.

Second, Pokemon Go has gotten a lot easier. I now get ep like candy. There is a plentiful selection of creatures to hunt. There seems to be enough ammo for someone with good aim who is not too greedy. Greedy folks and those with bad aim (You just missed the broad side of a Vennonat!) can walk.

Outliers can always play the walking game. It's not outlawed, but forget outliers for a moment. Pokemon Go just got easier for everybody, that means a once, fairly rare Tauros isn't rare any more. When something rare becomes common, it loses value. If other rarer creatures are out there, either rarer first generation (Pokes that are now harder to get because do you really want to walk? I do, but I'm an outlier as far as walking is concerned) or Second Generation (Not sure how these fit in, but I see the salivating all over the boards), exist, they become the thing to have and strive for. The incentivization is pretty artificial since all Pokes are useful and some have sentimental value, are beautiful, are humorous. It's Niantic messing with the values.

And striving for value (Value as accepted by the group) is a norm. I'd give my right eye teeth for a Seaking, but nobody talks about catching Goldeen or how Caterpie are rarer than they should be. They still are. You can scour the landscape for Caterpie but you won't find many Caterpie lovers among your friends who are going after the newest and the best, and those critters that just stand around waiting to be caught, they are just for the eight year olds and the casually playing middle, aged ladies.

That looks like where we are heading, and for those who think micropurchases can sustain a mass market game, the extra Pokes might fuel sales of extra large backpacks, though as an outlier I'm up for culling. Yes, that is what it is, a nasty low status activity if ever there was one.

 

[VisualJae]

^ None of that is Niantic's fault. That's just the basic result of any game design. You can NEVER achieve perfect balance in any game. It is logistically impossible. Not even the core series Pokémon games are like that. There will ALWAYS be something preferred over another, whether it's for competitive sake, flavor, or otherwise.

Not even the most played, most profitable AAA titles and franchises can achieve that balance. Blizzard Entertainment titles, MOBAs like League or Dota2, FPS's like CS:GO, CoD, BF, etc. Card games like MTG or Hearthstone. NONE of them are perfectly balanced where players can toss their hands in the air and go in whichever direction. There will ALWAYS be a direction players gravitate toward for whatever reason. The only way for anything to be balanced is if everything is exactly the same and that's not design.

As for making aspects of a game easier, those are simply moves to address quality of life for the majority of players. If game developers take note of common pain points amongst most of the player base, it is in the developers' best interest to address them for the sake of retaining the majority of those players. Whether or not they can is a different story. To give players the legitimate option to play in a style that best suits them is a plus, not a negative. To think otherwise is nothing short of elitism.

In GO, players have complained since day one the discrepancy between rural and urban. I live in the suburbs and work full time in the city. I can see first hand the advantages of being in the city (I completed my Dex in a month partially half-assing the effort at times and I'm rarely ever short of 100 Ultra Balls in my inventory). I am not surprised that Niantic is attempting to bridge the gap by diversifying Pokémon spawns.

Also I'm not sure what you're getting at with having to walk less. Since day one players are free to camp by consistent spawn points if they wanted to. It's just that now spawn points are higher in quantity. If players wish to maximize their opportunities in capturing new Pokémon, they have absolutely no choice but to walk. That hasn't changed. Would I have caught the Porygon this morning had I sat in place? No. Would I have caught the five Charmander last night if I sat in place? No.

Objectively speaking, from a game design and marketing management perspective, Niantic has improved immensely over the last couple months.

 

[Neltharion83]

I would like to point out that niantic sells pokecoins for real money and they make a lot of money this way.

I would also like to add that all those great casinos in for example Las Vegas do not charge an entry fee and are not plastered with advertisement inside. Its like magic, how do they not go broke unless run by Trump?

And when the playstation 3 got introduced, the hardware inside was worth more and cost more to produce than the retail price of the playstation itself. How can that be?

Oh, right, its another source of income at work here. Players who spend money on games.

 

[MizEileen]

I can't speak to the last couple of months.

I think we need get our urban/rural/suburban terminology straightened out. I think it has to do with density and sprawl.

Right now Niantic is doing more than going for retention by flooding the neighborhood with Pokes. My poor avie literally trips over them. The increase is close to 300%.

Pokemon Go has always been a walking game for me. I clearly have never camped out in one place unless I need to stay near a bus stop because I'm waiting for it, and that is a sad activity. All Poke runs for me are walks along particular routes or mapping expeditions. My goal is either to hatch eggs, obtain ammo, shoot stuff, rinse repeat, or to explore new territory and add it to my map. I can't even sit still long enough to drop a lure.

I wonder what Pokemon Go knows about its audience as a whole. From what I read on this board and even this discussion, I suspect it's segmented. I can kind of see that in the Pokes on offer. There are plenty of Ratattas and Pidgeys for diligent hoarders. There are Eevees which are oh so popular. There are Eggcutes because people in this town love Eggecutors, and a few of the Halloween Pokes have stuck around. This is a menu designed to serve a variety of customers.

Actually, I think discouraging the walking game is elitist since it requires no skill other than putting one foot in front of the other, reading the schematic/map, and reasonably, not-so-great aim. It is also poor public relations since players and Niantic claim that Pokemon Go gets people out to see the sights.

I don't think I'd turn the clock back if I could. I probably would not have increased the number of Pokes around stops 300%. I'd probably have settled for 125% to 150% or if the algorithm allowed it had those Pokes spawn within a wider radius. I'd also release fewer Tauros in urban areas, even if they are popular with players, but that is my own prejudice.

It might be fun to have a thread that discusses how we typically play Go. The field journals give some clues but most people can't be bothered to write things in detail. When we talk about Pokemon Go players do we really know who is out there?

 

[MizEileen]

VisualJae, you and I are both right when it comes to the Pokemon Go elephant. In-Game purchases are a source of revenue, and apparently can be a good one, but my queasiness when it comes to every paying one dime is also normal.

Apparently those who pay to play (and do it a lot) are called whales. In a whale model (Zynga's games, Candy Crush Saga and related, and perhaps Pokemon Go) a small percentage of big spenders makes the game profitable enough that the rest of us play it for free. This explains my shock and horror at the thought of paying anything.

Here are some articles that explain the economic model that I think you are describing. I am only going to post citations because I'm not sure what kind of access (School or university libraries or even public libraries) everyone has.


MacMillan, Douglas, and Brad Stone. "Zynga's Little-Known Addiction: "Whales." Bloomberg Businessweek 4237 (2011): 37. Publisher Provided Full Text Searching File. Web. 9 Nov. 2016.

Needleman, S. E. (2015, May 11). Mobile-game makers try to catch more 'whales' who pay for free games; with soft sell and number-crunching, 'candy crush saga' and 'kim kardashian: Hollywood' creators nudge you to spend $50 or $100 a month. Wall Street Journal (Online)


I think there is way more than guess work in the 300% spawn increase. I know that I feel more disappointed when I go from six Poke Balls to zero, repeatedly than when I go from two or three to zero or hang on to my two or three because I need more from the next stop.

This feeling of disappointment and missing out is a motivator (manipulator). Though the literature I posted says it's not usual or possible, is Pokemon Go trying to turn active players into whales?

 

[Neltharion83]

It may be that you are getting some of the fundamentals wrong. So let me give you some facts.

- Niantic, like any other online company, has development costs. There is no way around these, except giving us cheap-to-produce updates instead of gen 2 or breeding or trading :(

- Niantic has to pay for servers, this scales with size, the more servers you need the cheaper it gets for the amount of storage and/or processing power required. Most of the processing power in this case is client-side, your smartphone does the work, all the 3d graphics and audio, the server only transmits the numbers.

- Big companies pay nothing for internet traffic, except for some hardware cost. It really is close to zero, and for many companies it actually is zero.

So the real costs come down to running or renting the data centers, and development cost. Many other things are really just smart ways to invest, to make it all better, those all scale in size from zero to infinity, and these incluse advertisement, corporate image, technical and general support for users, localisation/translation/penetrating into other markets, hiring people to do social media and to interact with journalists, and so on.

Then, the whales are not everything, many users pay as much as they would for other games they would play instead. In a free2play game, they pay nothing at first, and then pay a little bit when they realize they had fun for a few hours. Then they keep spending losely connected to how much they are playing.

So you really just want to keep the playerbase happy.

 

[VisualJae]

VisualJae, you and I are both right when it comes to the Pokemon Go elephant. In-Game purchases are a source of revenue, and apparently can be a good one, but my queasiness when it comes to every paying one dime is also normal.

Apparently those who pay to play (and do it a lot) are called whales. In a whale model (Zynga's games, Candy Crush Saga and related, and perhaps Pokemon Go) a small percentage of big spenders makes the game profitable enough that the rest of us play it for free. This explains my shock and horror at the thought of paying anything.

...

This feeling of disappointment and missing out is a motivator (manipulator). Though the literature I posted says it's not usual or possible, is Pokemon Go trying to turn active players into whales?

I am quite familiar with the concept of "whales" in the gaming industry. It's nothing new. Microtransactions have existed for ages. Countless games in the past have incorporated elements of pay-to-play or pay-to-win.

I spend money on games because I have the income to do so. Not everyone is in the same boat and not everyone has the same mentality. Of course, what I spend pales in comparison to many others. I've played many online games in the past where there's always a solid line between grinding and "play-to-win" vs. buying your way through or "pay-to-win." I have close friends who have spend hundreds to even thousands of dollars in digital goods. If someone is willing to pay for instant gratification out of their own pockets, that's no different than spending hundreds every weekend at a bar or night club.

Everything has cost. An online game especially. Like Neltharion already posted, if Pokémon GO is 100% free to play with zero channels for profit, the company is putting itself in dangerous territory. Companies NEED revenue to stay afloat. But no one is asking for the players to spend. I run three accounts for Pokémon GO. I spend money on my main Mystic account. My Instinct and Valor accounts have zero monetary investments in them and they're doing just fine.

As a side note, I'm curious how you're running out of Poké Balls. Even in the most rural locations I've visited since this game was released, there are always at least some Poké Stops within traveling distance, whether it's by foot or by car. Where I personally live, I have a single Poké Stop within walking distance (approximately 5-minute walk) and the next one is a 15-minute walk away. Should I choose to stay in this area, I just take a short drive. Otherwise, I just head to the nearest hotspot, or essentially a 20-minute drive north.

 

[MizEileen]

Jae,

As I've said, I have terrible aim. I'm completely missing fusion between my eyes. As a result, I have no depth perception (I see perspective to give me an approximation of a third dimension), objects in the distance bounce around, and I positively stink at judging distance of moving objects. In fact, I can not drive due to my visual issues. As a result, I tend to waste Poke Balls.

As for distance, there is a Poke Stop near my home, and two others a ten minute walk away. About a mile away is a whole batch of them about a mile up the road or behind the WalMart.. Usually I pick up PokeBalls on my way to work since the stops are near the train station.

And I spend money for online recreation. I have a Premium membership in Second Life ($60/year) and also rent a small piece of land for another $10.00 a month. I have been raising a Zooby Baby for a year, but Zooby has a different economic structure. I think of my Second Life spending as an investment. If I want to make something, I need textures and pay to upload them. They can be reused copied, given away etc...

My virtual son used to get a couple of dollars worth of consumables a week, but Zooby (which operates inside Second Life) works differently. The reason my son does not get as many consumables is that I dislike Zooby's food for older babies and so have built my own low table and magic bowls to feed my virtual son "real food."

Aside from virtual breedable food or Zooby Baby supplies, I tend to invest in games I like, but spending a lot on consumables still leave me squicky, and the portion of Second Life Linden Labs runs is again on a different financial model than a lot of phone games.

My penchant for investment rather than consumables could just be a matter of taste. I am thinking of investing in a pair of touch screen gloves for the winter, and I have already bought a fifteen foot extension cord so I can tether the phone to the power supply, and unhook it sporadically to hit the Pokestop across the street. It's not so different from what you do.

What worries me is people getting sucked in by various persuasive means to spend money or watch advertisements. That doesn't mean investing in a video game or virtual world is a bad idea. Niantic messing with my head by renorming is problematic.