Niantic struck gold with Pokémon Go

On Wednesday, Niantic said that it is selling its game division, including Pokémon Go, to mobile game company Scopely for $3.5 billion. It’s a move that raises concern based on Scopely’s ownership and their history of squeezing every dollar out of players in games like Monopoly Go. As someone who has played Pokémon Go near-obsessively for the last nine years, this worries me, and I’ll be watching closely to see what Scopely does.

It marks the end of an era for Niantic, which built a juggernaut. Pokémon Go is by any metric one of the most successful mobile games of all time, a genuine cultural phenomenon when it released and still — yes, still — going strong today.

Pokémon Go was a showcase for Niantic’s strength in augmented reality and location-based gaming, and was seen as a vanguard for a new genre of mobile games with real-world elements. Niantic tried to re-use the formula for games based on Harry Potter, Marvel and the NBA; Microsoft tried to get in on the action with Minecraft Earth, which effectively turned the whole planet into a giant Minecraft level. It looked like the future of mobile gaming.

And yet that hasn’t happened, has it? Microsoft shut down Minecraft Earth, and Niantic never found another hit anywhere near the level of Pokémon Go. But I think the reason for this is clear: Pokémon Go’s success isn’t down to the technology, it’s because of Pokémon itself.

In the early days of the Pokémon Go craze — you know, when people were running across streets to catch a Snorlax — the augmented reality (AR) element got plenty of attention. For those unfamiliar with Pokémon Go, the game takes place on a map of your actual surroundings. Pokémon appear around you on that map; tapping on them takes you to a screen where you can try to catch them. This screen either shows the Pokémon against a generic background or, if you choose, in AR: your phone’s camera is used to display a live feed of whatever it’s pointing at and the Pokémon is overlaid on to the image as if it’s “standing” in the real world in front of you.

AR was a novelty then, so it played a major part in the initial viral outbreak of Pokémon Go. Social media was flooded with pictures of Pokémon in funny places.

But here’s the thing: find a Pokémon Go player today and ask them if they use AR in the game. I guarantee you that they do not. It might be cute the first time you do that, but after that it’s a chore. You have to slowly move your phone to scan your surroundings every time you enter AR mode. Then you have to hold the phone a certain way to keep the Pokémon in frame, which isn’t easy considering how much they move and how big some can be. It’s a great party trick. But if you actually want to play the game, AR is annoying.

Of course, AR is only one part of Niantic’s secret sauce; the other is that their games are location-based, meaning you’ve got to actually go to certain places in the real world to play the game. They’ve built a tremendous store of data from running location-based games for 12 years. They know which real places are good spots for players to gather at in-game landmarks, like putting Pokémon Gyms in a busy park.

And so this works powerfully in Pokémon Go: grass-type Pokémon frequent parks; water-type Pokémon are common near rivers and lakes. I can’t count the number of times I’ve taken a detour to seek out a rare or uncommon Pokémon a block or two away.

But I would argue again that, while location-based gaming is more compelling than AR, it is not necessarily a draw in its own right — and that it only works here because it is a perfect fit for Pokémon.

Pokémon games are all about your character, a young Pokémon Trainer, taking their first steps out in the world to explore and catch Pokémon. And Pokémon Go mirrors this: you’re not controlling a character, you are the Pokémon trainer, going out in your own world to catch Pokémon. It’s the closest thing an adult like me raised on Pokémon games will ever come to living out the fantasy of that world.

Niantic’s other major game, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, provides a good contrast. On the face of it, this is also a perfect license for Niantic’s technology. Harry Potter’s world is essentially our own — okay, that’s a good fit for location-based mobile gaming. And in the series, the wizarding world is tucked just out of the sight of us non-magical folks — making it the perfect place to use AR to “reveal” the magical world in our own, just as AR makes Pokémon “appear” in front of you.

Disclaimer: I do not support JK Rowling. Trans rights are human rights.

But the game is a dud because the gameplay itself has little to do with Harry Potter. It's not an adventure with Harry, Ron and Hermione; it's not set in Hogwarts, like all the stories are. The thrust of the game involves battling obscure creatures rarely seen in the books or films to collect a list of knickknacks that even avid fans would struggle to get excited about.

Contrast that with Pokémon. Collecting them isn’t a chore, it’s the whole point: Gotta Catch ‘Em All, remember? There’s hundreds of Pokémon to catch, and every Pokémon is someone’s favorite. In Pokémon Go, you catch, train and battle: the three core elements of the series, whether you’re playing the game on Switch or watching the TV show. I don’t know what you’re supposed to feel playing Wizards Unite, but playing Pokémon Go makes you feel like a Pokémon trainer.

It’s hard to shake the idea that Niantic struck gold with their first license in a way that just can’t be replicated again. They didn't succeed because AR or location-based gaming was inherently compelling — it’s that those elements happen to work perfectly with Pokémon. And Pokémon is the largest entertainment franchise in the world: bigger than Marvel, bigger than Star Wars.

How can you possibly top that? Niantic couldn't. But they were never going to.