Remember that one glorious summer when absolutely everyone was playingPokemon Go? Apologies for making you feel old, but that was seven years ago. A lot of people had stopped playing by the end of that summer, but plenty didn’t. The mobile game remains a huge money spinner forNiantic, raking in billions for the studio every single year.
When a game makes that much money year-on-year, the studio responsible will naturally be hard at work trying to figure out why that is. Once they do that, they can apply the magic formula to other projects. The problem is with Pokemon Go, the magic formula can’t be applied to anything else, and Niantic needs to stop trying to make the next Pokemon Go happen.
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Niantic has managed to get its hands on some pretty massive IPs in its attempts to replicate the magic of Pokemon Go. Naturally every other studio, series, and franchise on the planet wants a piece of that action. First it wasHarry Potter, but it has also partnered with theNBA, and evenMarveltried to get a slice of the pie. Marvel’s Pokemon Go-style game will never see the light of day though,canceled before it even had a release dateas Niantic let go of more than 200 employees.
Niantic has enjoyed less and less success with each passing attempt at creating the next Pokemon Go. Wizards Unite lasted about two and a half yearsbefore it was shut down, NBA All-World’s run will end at just eight months when it shuts down in September, and Marvel’s World Of Heroes, well, we covered that. Pokemon Go marches on though, and there’s a very simple reason for that which its creators must be able to see.
Ever since I first played Pokemon Blue, I have dreamed of being able to go out into the real world and catch actualPokemon. Back then, and for the 20 years after that, I assumed the games I played would be the closest we would ever come. Then Niantic announced Pokemon Go. A game where you can go out into the world and catch Pokemon. An unattainable reality millions of us had wanted for two decades. So much so that lapsed fans returned, even if some of them didn’t stick around for long.
You know what no one has dreamed of for any amount of time? Going out into the world and finding traces of magic, or wandering around your neighborhood looking for famous basketball players to… befriend? I’m sorry, I’m not entirely sure what the goal of NBA All-World is. Suffice to say, trying to apply the same Pokemon Go paint to basketball and the Wizarding World was never going to work. Sure, plenty of us have wanted to go to Hogwarts, play in the NBA, or even know what it feels like to be a superhero, but none of those feelings can be replicated using the Pokemon Go formula.
The lightning in a bottle Niantic captured with Pokemon Go isn’t that people could go on a walk with a game based on their favorite IP in their pocket. It’s that the IP the game pulled from is one where the entire premise is exploring the world in search of rare creatures, trying to catch ‘em all. That seems to be the fundamental misunderstanding here from Niantic. It’s not what the game is based on, it’s what that game requires you to do. Catching Pokemon in the real world is good. Walking around searching for superheroes hits different, just not in a good way.
All of that said, Niantic may have finally figured that out and partnered up with a series that might actually work.Monster Hunter. Despite canceling two games already this year,Monster Hunter Now will still launch in September. A game very similar to Pokemon where, you guessed it, you hunt monsters. Its similarities to Pokemon mean this might just work. That’s unless Niantic expects the same popularity and revenue it continues to receive from Pokemon Go. The formula can be successfully applied to Monster Hunter, but it isn’t going to bring in billions for the studio.
My fear is that Niantic will be expecting huge things from Monster Hunter Now and it too will eventually bite the dust just like almost everything to have come before it. Perhaps if it can at least outperform Wizards Unite and Niantic’s other failed projects, which it absolutely should, it stands a chance. After that, Niantic would do well to focus more of its efforts on Pokemon Go rather than trying to figure out what the next Pokemon Go might be.
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