Over the past few week we’ve seen and heard much regarding the phenomenon that is Pokemon Go.
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This is even more impressive considering that Nintendo doesn’t even control the direction of the game.
If you are playing Pokemon Go around your city or town, keep an eye out for places that offer free Wi-Fi – like the public library, a nearby Starbucks, or any other public space with a connection.
Either way, there have certainly been some downtime issues with Pokemon GO.
At the same time, Pokemon Go has won praise already for encouraging people to go outside and get exercise. Meanwhile, other countries like Japan are still without the game – which should strike many as odd considering that the Pokemon franchise originates from the aforementioned land of the rising sun. The system also went down after Niantic opened up the game in 26 countries throughout Europe shortly over the weekend.
Pokemon GO has quickly become a mobile gaming phenomenon, but there’s still room for improvement. But the impact to Nintendo’s bottom line could be minimal because of shared ownership, as little as 3 percent of net profit in the year to next March. Last Friday, Nintendo traded roughly $4.5 billion worth of shares, and that’s clearly an insane amount of money for them to be whipping around.
UT Plan II alumnus John Hanke is the CEO of Niantic, the software developer behind the game.
That said, Nintendo do have plenty of precedents for succeeding with unproven tech. “That’s why they’ll blow everybody out of the water once they start take iOS and Android more seriously than they do now”, Toto said.
While it’s certainly possible that someone could discern the location of a secret base with Pokemon Go, these kinds of facilities are usually pretty far from cities anyway.
There are no signs, however, that will happen soon.
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Perhaps most notably – Pokemon Go represents both Nintendo’s first major success in the mobile market and their first major success without the aid of the retail channel.
