Picture of a park charging $10 for people to come to catch Pokemon all in one day. 🙂
Pokemon the cartoon was popular when I was growing up. Those who were born in the 80-90s are downloading this game like crazy. The obvious winners are Nintendo and the game maker themselves. What makes the game so popular?
1. Almost everyone had a phone with data. So implement a game with real life GPS to catch fictional characters and train them to do battle with in virtual world in real time is exciting. Had the game was made 5 years ago, it wouldn’t picked up like today.
2. Pokemon also attract younger generation. I’m battling with my 9 years old neighbor like no other. I’m talking to my tenants about the game and where to find stuff. It’s weird, in a good way. :)h
3. Yes, people are looking stupid by having their head down looking at their phone tracking down the monsters. 🙂 but people are walking to parks, museums, and other attractions. It makes people liking the city more. 🙂 at my hospital, each hospitals will have a Pokestop, which attracts so many players that rare Pokemon shows up very often. You can see the screen light up as people taking turn burning incense to attract more characters. People start talking to each other at the hospital’s garden?! Humm!
The games come with risks – people are getting shot, stampeded on, driving car into a police car, getting robbed, spending more money as shops pay Nintendo $10 to lure more pokemons into their shops.
Now, who benefit?
Data providers – Verizon, T-Mobile, att, and sprint.
Shop owners, museums, parks.
Apple and Google, but the clear winner is Apple as more Apple users download and play Pokemon.
As the game maker will improve the game, people can star trading monsters, I guess more thing will happen. As for now, the game is here to stay for a long period of time. Prospect of VZ, T and AAPL are looking up. Even if there is a major correction, these companies will survive. 🙂
Congrats on those who owns those companies. 🙂
And there are a few others – I’m finding and adding – more daily. https://drog98.wordpress.com/2016/07/14/summer-days/
I love the list. I forgot to add McDonald’s. The stocks rose because they add Pokemon to happy meals. Dang! McDonald’s have great marketing team.
Some of the good ones are injuries on the rise? Insurance companies. Just love it.
My son downloaded the app. He recently watched all the shows on youtube. It’s crazy! I remember my younger sister and cousins watching this years ago… It just shows you the power of branding and how it can be leveraged by various companies.
D4s
Great post Vivianne. I’m actually working on a post of who missed this opportunity. This phenomenon gave the opportunity for companies to jump on board and capture an audience. Many have done nothing which shocks me.
Time to bye telcos as their average revenue per user will rise. A lot of data users only have 1 GIG on their plan, and those kind of games will demand more data, thus cell phone users will upgrade to bigger plans with more data, thus creating more revenues for telcos. Just my analysis.
It is a huge benefit that the app gets people outside, exploring new parts of a city, and moving around versus staying inside and staring at a screen. You are right, it does look ridiculous and seeing a park full of 150 people playing the game was a very strange haha
I am curious to see how high phone bills are going to be for people now that the app has aged. The amount of data that is being used is insane! That’s the part of it that always has me speechless.
Thanks for the great read!
Bert
I remember this being the craze when I was younger, but I never got into. I just heard on the radio that a teacher decided to quite her job because she could sell pokemon accounts on ebay for $300+. When I heard this I thought about my wife and how happy I am to have her because she would rather teach and be with the students than be selfish and try to catch them all and profit.