Cam Reacts to: The Pokemon GO Craze

Is this going to be Nintendo's biggest win ever?

Pokemon GO Craze - (Article)

The Pokemon Logo

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few days, chances are you’ve heard of the new mobile craze: Pokémon GO, the most recent game in the Nintendo Library that has been one of its largest ventures to date. Since the turn of the century, when the first games were released in America and other English nations, the journey Pokémon has taken has never once subsided, and has never run low on the hype it needed to push TV shows, movies, and games, hitting the top of lists in their own respective categories. When it was announced that you could catch Pokémon in the real world for free, naturally, the whole world lost its mind.

The core gameplay is essentially the same as all the others in the series: you walk around as you catch Pokémon, and you use them to battle in a virtual arena space with other players, but what makes this game so addictive? Could it be the mere fact that you’re acting like the trainer? Instead of sitting on your couch, running around in the games, is it that much more rewarding to be going around the physical world you live in, and not just an imaginary one? For me anyways, this is probably one of its cooler features. What sound better: “I caught a Squirtle in a game”, or, “I caught a Squirtle in my backyard”? To me, it’s definitely the latter. It seems to add a layer of personality to the game, and discussion factor you can converse with other players.

It works much like a scavenger hunt, it’s fun to not only be playing the game, especially one with a following of this size, but it’s great to be active while doing it. I’ve ran around my yard looking for things, visited the park, and walked along my street looking to see if I can get anything besides a mountain of Rattata.

Like it or not, there’s no doubting the massive effect the game has had on the world. Millions of people have already installed the game, and in 6 days, it is threatening the user metrics of twitter, a social giant. In just one week, the users of this app have already overtaken it, with no signs of stopping. This is expected to be one of the biggest and fasted wins for the company ever, with the estimate being  in the tens of millions of dollars for Nintendo’s pockets.

I like the game. I’ve played it, I’ve ran around catching things, and I’ve enjoyed myself while doing it. Not much else I can say. It’s a clever idea, executed well (but it definitely could use some improvements). What do you think about the game? Any thoughts?

Anyways mates, thanks for reading! As mentioned before, if you have any thoughts, or liked the post, please leave a like or comment. This post is a bit shorter, but that’s only because I wanted to go over the main points quickly, so I could have more time to see what you think. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you later in the week for another editorial, Society Smash on Friday, and “The Lie We Live”, part 2.