I do not think it saved it, other things could have done this as well. Losing 75% of the player base after a massive hype, instead of 98%, means that you survived the massive hype quite well.
In a gigantic realm of possible new creative content, a good path was chosen, one of many possible good paths.
Raids are a big thing, really positive, really good results, many players returned. Raids are fun. Being a good player with many strong pokemon does matter, such players allow raids to succeed with fewer people, and they also can solo more raids.
As someone who never really stopped, i have to say winter was bad, and the old gyms were bad. If you cannot play for more than 15 minutes before your fingers start to freeze, it is not fun to play. People who survived winter were welcomed with increasing amounts of events, with different pokemon spawning and on top things like double dust, or double XP, or double candy. Spawn rate and spawn duration was increased globally and permanently.
What the big event with double everything, and the raids, and the legendarys did is to bring back old players and even bring in some new players. It worked, this was one way to do it.
In the cities, the game now causes some new attention and also controversy. I have seen Lugia raids with 60 people moving through just in the time i stayed there to do the raid myself, people notice when you got 35 people in some random place and hear people announcing things like: "Ok, so we need a split, everyone who is team blue move over here, the rest over there" or "I got 14 in the group now, 55 seconds" or "code is bulba, bulba, charmander". Its like a flashmob.
People called the police, a lot, and they show up sometimes and have a good laugh. Its a new reality even for people who do not play the game. Suddenly 20 people show up, then more, then its like up to 40 people, standing in circles for minutes with their smartphones, then they come and go, over 2 hours up to 200+ people move through standing in circles with their smartphones, then everyone disappears.
People need to do time-lapse footage of big raids. From a window or something, this must look crazy in time lapse over the 2 hours for a chase legendary raid.
This is just a small glimpse into what is possible with just the most rudimentary augmented reality.
Some simple and advanced features:
- Place markers on the map only for yourself. Noone else can see them. Never forget where you parked your car, or how to find the way to a place you sometimes visit but not quite often enough to solidly remember the way.
- Despawn pokemon, gyms and stops in areas and put warnings, with arrows that point where you should go, on areas in case of an evacuation. This could save lives, imagine another tsunami killing another several hundreds of thousands of people along several coastlines, including groups of pokemon go players who were NOT WARNED. In my city, we carry out a few evacuation per year because the ground is full of heavy bombs that did not detonate in WW2. There is not much danger, but the area needs to be evacuated in a hurry after a bomb discovery, then needs to be screened and verified empty by police, then it can be disarmed or there can be a controlled detonation. Pokemon go currently hinders these efforts instead of helping.
- Public transportation has multiple modes and is tightly interwoven in many cities. Here we have a tight subway system, local and suburban trains, streetcars/trams, and buses. First step: Show all the stations, make all the scedules available by clicking on the station or bus stop. Second step: Put timers on the stations and indicators that show when the next vehicle drives where, based on scedule. Third step: Most of these vehicles are tracked real-time in my city, and the stations have a digital display showing when the next train/tram/subway/bus will arrive going where, and this data is updated REAL TIME and will respond to minor delays for trains or subways, even to trams and busses stuck in traffic. Enough to animate those transportation options real time.
- In our city, all running over several different apps, we have the following options allowing you to grab/rent a vehicle, all can be found in random places, some can often be found at certain stations: Two rent-a-bike services, rent an electric scooter, rent a gas-powered scooter, and AT LEAST two car-sharing services, one from BMW where you can rent mini cooper, BMW, and some electric BMW i3s, and one from mercedes, where you can rent mercedes and smart and i think also some electric / hybrid cars. All working with real-time location data and on smartphones, just in 10 different apps. You could allow users to show some of them, the services where they are a member, allowing them to grab such a vehicle, and allow these users to crowd their map with bicycles, scooters, BMW cars, mercedes cars, mini coopers, electric scooters, smart cars, and electric cars.
- You could even induce them to try to do good things, report overflowing trash bins, report a fire or a medical emergency or a violent attack, or put something particularly beautiful that few people noticed on the map for people, or draw them to a river to just clean it up and pick up some trash. The last one would be an event about cleaning up a river, with just a symbolic reward for participating, all about meeting up and everyone just picking up a few pieces of trash or getting more involved, with infrastructure and equipment planned in advance.
The potential of this is just ridiculous. Its a stupid (yet fun and addictive) little game about catching creatures in the real world using augmented reality that now has a head start on it all. The game is so rudimentary, the potential is so massive, but it is the biggest application of augmented reality ever, and ongoing. Maybe navigation systems for cars that track traffic jams and accidents were and are still a bigger application, but that is so rudimentary that it has to be questioned if this even qualifies.
These technologies will advance fast. Groups of people appearing like flashmobs and then standing in circles for minutes, all hooked to their smartphone screens, will tell many relevant experts that they are fucking up if they are not properly paying attention to this.
All the police stations on the planet need to adapt to filter out calls about pokemon go raids. "Do you see most of the suspicious people holding smartphones? How many are there, and how many of those do you see active on their smartphones? Are they moving a lot, or mostly just standing in circles?".
