Ever remember that electric mouse that used to shock Ash to oblivion, well Pikachu and 151 Pokemon might just be waiting around your street corner thanks to Pokemon Go, a smartphone game by Nintendo and Niantic studio that’s making ripples online besides Quadeel Baloch and Mia Khalifa.
Pokémon Go is an Augmented Reality (AR) game that makes use of ones smartphone camera to give real time world information along with an virtual outlay of virtual creatures, save points and Gyms for training and maxing out your Pokémon, all around your city, allowing one to explore the places around town.
Its been doing well since its launch on July 6 since when it has seen the game being downloaded over 10 million times which later left Niantic in a fix with servers crashing recently, but going by the trend, they had it up and running in hours.
Risqué Behaviour:
The game gets people out of their homes, making sure the avatar moves with ones phones GPS, but considering the fact that the camera software’s have no way of gauging real time hazards like traffic, thugs and rain, this is surely a bane in India where road hogs ride on pavements and throw the pedal to the meddle. We might end up with more categories of road accidents for the country and the state that tops in terms of deaths due to road accidents.
The recent death of a driver of the Tesla S car due to autopilot failure where scene recognition tech failed to gauge distance to next vehicle is one incident which highlighted that smart tech is not so smart as one thought it to be so.
The game is available on iOS as well as Android with the games being available on both the official app store in US,UK and many places of the world beside APK sites which allow you to side loaded the app in the asian continents which are yet to receive a launch which is scheduled for later this week.
The only downside is that there are a lot of Trojan apps masquerading as the game waiting for someone to download and let few smart phone viruses and data theft on the loose, iOS had an issue with email account permission which has been rectified since its launch.
Not so funny incidents:
One women found another womens dead body in the river while looking for a some water type pokemon.
Muggers faking pokestop points at the dark places of certain American cities and conning people into coming to these areas for rare pokemon and more points.
Many look alike Pokemon Go apps have come up that make unsuspecting users download virus and malware ridden version that can play truant with your personal information.
Other successful Pokemon titles:
Pokemon Red,Blue,Green(ports of the original game based on character and Pokemon choice, Gameboy Advance): Over 31 million copies sold
Pokemon Yellow: Over 25 million copies sold.
In Numbers:
Pokemon GO: Over 10 million downloads.
Revenue : 1.6 billion dollars per day.
Sound Bytes:
It took 20 years to make an overnight success- Niantic CEO John Hanke