The 2 lines can be thought of as ceilings or upper bounds, hence why they are static - this are the numbers that traffic was expected to eventually reach at peak.So you can think of it as, "we thought we'd be looking at graphs that had this line as the top and traffic would be some curve underneath.
Obviously from the graph shown here, we/they needed a tall graph.
I think this is the disconnect. This wasn't not obvious to me. It looked like everyone was expecting flat growth at either 1X or 5X. If there was a line showing what they thought would be the traffic that goes up (which would be expected) in addition to the ceiling lines then I think there would have been a lot less confusion.
I wonder if a single bar graph would have illustrated it better with overlaying colors for each ceiling.
Question: When should we start checking around for posts containing
A) High-level technical overviews with some basic implementational detail
B) In-depth analyses of the stack you built, the challenges you faced, what improvements you folded back into various open-source components, what you'd have done differently, etc etc
?
I'm thinking in terms of timescales - like n months or so. I suspect (A) will be a little easier (and quicker?) to publish than (B).
The Niantic team did incredible things given the instant historic success that became Pokemon Go.
The generic 1X, 5X and 50X are hard to understand in this context I think. Pokemon is so popular it's very difficult in imaging what the real numbers actually are. For instance on launch day in America and Asia I would have expected insane numbers (many hundreds of million).
I also feel like the 1X, 5X and 50X number placeholders are useless in this conversation because it doesn't give a sense of scale at all.
Given no app had ever done this in history over the first few weeks, yet alone on launch day with no marketing, I doubt it.
But in all seriousness this is Pokemon; they sold over 3 million copies of a remake of a game on a niche portable console in just 3 days; elevating its brand to an open platform for FREE that can be downloaded and installed on theoretically, what, a billion or more devices? Seems incredibly doable for Pokemon. Few other brands could do the same. Even Mario wouldn't be able to come close to competing with Pokemon's brand power.
I would be very interested in the real numbers :)
If this doesn't clearly show how crazy this growth was compared to what anyone was expecting, I'm not sure we're operating in the same plane.
"Many hundreds of millions" implies at least three of them.
I would not expect the entire population of the US to be playing on day one, especially the roughly 50% of them that don't even own a phone.
Sigh. This would have been easier if we had real numbers. Let us all test our hypothesis. Oh well.