Let’s do something you are only allowed to do on the internet: tell the world about how a product will fail that you have never even tried yourself!
Seriously, I never played Pokemon Go, don’t have any intent to and did not even pay much any attention to it’s media coverage. Heck, I didn’t even bother to fully understand the concept and yet I’m going to predict that the game will be a has-been in less than half a year.
Here’s my argument:
- Every game starts to get boring after a while and players start to stop playing. Pokemon Go not only more or less exhausted it’s potential for growth already, but also did it in a very short timespan. That means massive numbers of players will quit at once in waves, with no way of filling the void, they leave.
- It’s summer now on the northern hemisphere. Nothing wrong with going outside and catching Pokemon in the park, but I’m pretty sure the central gimmick of the game is going to become pretty unpopular once the rainy November days start.
- Once the weather starts getting cold, a lot of outdoor facilities (theme parks, swimming pools, beer gardens,…) will start closing down for winter. Niantics “location based services” business model will severally tank when that happens. The remaining indoor customers will sooner or later notice the declining playerbase and stop advertising on Go (if they don’t find out that location based services do more harm than good first).
- This leaves IAP to pay for the servers. Only problem here: thats an extremely asymmetric business model in which a few big spenders subsidize a majority of non-paying players, which spent most of their time bitching about how expensive, unfair and pay to win the system is. Scale that to the current installbase of Pokemon Go and you got a PR problem that can make the game pretty unpopular pretty fast.
Niantic had to invest into more infrastructure than it originally planned for, in order to host more players than they expected. A mass exodus is pretty much inevitable and will probably result in the system imploding.
