Pokémon Go has gone from exciting idea to worldwide phenomenon in two weeks. It’s got a panel at San Diego Comic-Con, it’s raking in cash hand over fist, and it has become the most popular Pokémon game, not to mention mobile game, in the history of smartphones. So why the heck did Nintendo think nobody was going to play it?
The game is, on the surface, well-designed, and there are some nice touches. That it’s free to play, and that you don’t need to shell out money to find Pokémon, is a welcome tack for Nintendo to take. The concept is arguably brilliant on its face as you walk around the real world to capture and groom adorable critters. But once you get into the details, Pokémon Go is, as a game, an enormous mess.
On a technical level, it’s riddled with glitches, the servers crash whenever a new country is added, and there are a multitude of important details the game doesn’t explain, like the fact that you’re unlikely to see any Pokémon unless you have a GPS signal. On a user level, you’d be forgiven for thinking it hates you. It won’t explain how any of its systems work. Nobody bothered to check the permissions the game requests, making it a privacy nightmare. It hides major statistics about your monsters, making fights a matter of guesswork. The placement of Pokéstops and justification for them borders on the ridiculous, and even finding Pokémon is more or less a roll of the dice. Most of the tools you can use to get more out of the game are apps and websites designed by players frustrated with the game and seeking to fix it.
To be fair, this is the first Pokémon MMO, and both massively multiplayer games and mobile games are new territory for Nintendo. Nor did Nintendo and Niantic rush a product out the door. The game has its roots in a Google April Fools’ Joke and had been in development for two years when it launched. What’s painfully clear, though, is that Nintendo viewed this game as little more than a lark, a test bed for possible mobile success, but certainly nothing more than that.
And yet, that’s what’s happening. Nintendo’s business philosophy has been at odds with the mobile market from the beginning, and the company’s first mobile app, Miitomo, was essentially a goofy social network instead of a game. Historically, Nintendo made games for Nintendo’s hardware, and that was their business model. Even Pokémon Go shipped with the Plus, a $35 wrist-based widget that syncs with your phone and lets you catch Pokémon without taking out your phone. In another sign Nintendo didn’t realize what they had, the Plus has been impossible to find for weeks and it’s not clear when, or if, more will ship. And now Nintendo finds itself facing the fact that abandoning their business model, even in the most tentative way, has given it one of the biggest successes it’s ever experienced.
While the Nintendo 3DS remains a powerful force in gaming and continues to be a major revenue source for the company, the Wii U was a failure, and their next console, currently called the Nintendo NX, is a question mark that isn’t launching until after the holiday season. If the NX isn’t an enormous hit out of the gate, Nintendo’s investors will begin asking why they’re building hardware when a free-to-play game is keeping the lights on. Nintendo’s executive suite is no doubt shocked and grateful at the game’s success, but Pokémon Go may force the company to find answers to the questions it was hoping no one would ask.