John Hanke, CEO of Niantic Labs, who created Pokemon Go together with Nintendo, believes that players should wear contact lenses connected to the Internet. Hanke became a star in the high-tech industry, along with the growing popularity of the mobile game Pokemon Go, which became the most downloadable application and has already been downloaded 50 million times. Giant audience also caused a wave of criticism of the young company - users are annoyed with missing functions, sad strategic decisions and inaccessibility in most countries of the world.
They even hacked the Niantic Twitter account and put in it the call to launch the game in Brazil, where, incidentally, the Olympic games are taking place.
Niantic claims that its 50 employees work nights at night to resolve all issues. And with all this negative, Hanke is pleased. The game has reached its goal and is moving right into his, Khanka, the future, which he announced from the stage of the GamesBeat conference in Rancho Palos Verdes.
"It looks like everything is working," he said.
Pokemon Go is a completely redesigned version of Ingress, a mobile game that Hanke and his small team developed at Google when he worked in a high position in the card development department.
Although Ingress has lost its share of fame, Niantic has been thinking about the fact that for a greater focus on the game it should have something of a popular culture. So Hanke came to the Pokemon, watching as his three children filled the house with cards, guides and video games related to this animated franchise.
The following fact also helped: the leaders on the other side were serious fans of Ingress. The deal was concluded.
"Ingress has shown that they can easily make the right decisions," said JK Smith, senior director of consumer marketing at Pokemon Co. International. "There has not been another game like this yet."
Relationships strengthened when last year Niantic separated from Google and became a separate company, which allowed Pokemon Co. and the game developer Pokemon Nintendo become shareholders along with Google. Hanke rejected proposals of several venture capitalists, giving new partners a sense of confidence that the "crown of their creation" will be protected.
These games have the same goals: to get people to move. To help them look at the world with other eyes, discover the secrets and legends of their city. Gently encourage physical exercise. Help people find a common language in the real world, offline.
Promotion in these games requires wandering around the city and stopping at millions of large objects (museums, parks, memorials and other culturally significant and visually distinct places). Hanke says that an interesting solution was to combine the gameplay with involving people and the "accidental" discovery of history.
"This park, which is next to your house, you pass by every day and never looked at it," he says. - What happens if people start to go there? Will it be better? Will they want to make it cleaner, for example, when the next subbotnik comes? ".
If the city will benefit, and the player learns something new, super; if not, the game does not force it. Ingress players traveled more than 300 million kilometers last year.
"I'm glad that we did not launch the game under the supervision of adults at an early stage, because this idea would be bad," says Hanke.
He also did not want the sale of virtual items in the game to be the only revenue, as developers often have to sacrifice elements of the gameplay to make this strategy work. He had to protect Niantic from himself.
The startup decided to offer stores, restaurants and other businesses to promote their places in the game. Several global sponsors supported Ingress, and talking about the new game, he noted that the company is negotiating with "a whole bunch of enterprises." Early researches of Ingress advertisers showed that it works: the players visited and made purchases in the advertised places more often. Business opportunities can become even more tempting when Niantic will add other games, pay attention to new demographic groups and, thus, attract more advertisers.
Niantic creates events in Ingress, encouraging players to meet and compete among themselves, and plans to do the same with Pokemon Go. Similarly, players in video games are increasingly playing and watching e-sports, talking with like-minded people. Over 200,000 people visited Ingress last year. Pokemon Go will provide a much greater response, which will complicate the search for a venue and security measures, Hanke said.
Pokemon Go or other Niantic games can also go beyond smartphones. Hanke noted that he is pleased to invest in startups developing hardware, and promotes the popularization of their technologies in their games. You can imagine that Pokemon Go will become the flagship application for the Magic Leap headset, among which shareholders also have Google.
Hanke, a science fiction enthusiast, says that smart watches, fitness trackers and other wearable technologies will eventually pour out into hours, or even better into contact lenses that can lay a virtual layer right on the field of view - so people do not stare into the phones.
And it will be soon. Hanke worked with the Google Glass team, he knows what he's talking about.
The article is based on materials .
Comments
Post a Comment