Your points about AR are worth emphasizing: Pokemon Go has AR... that most users turn off. With AR turned off, it's strictly a location-based game.
After we sunset it, it really struck me how scary GaaS can be. No one can play Minecraft in AR any more (at least currently) and I think that, even if it got old fast, it was a pretty magical experience. It made me really want to record a video playthrough for a few hours to try and capture the experience.
While it is theoretically fun to plop your Piplup on a table and feed it a Pinap: it’s slower than a Slowking to do so, and got very old very fast.
Some of the big flying Pokémon were also terrible to interact with. Nearly off-screen if they moved.
I used to walk my local park daily for years, only ever saw a few people. Seemingly out of nowhere, the park seemed always packed...kids, adults, you name it. It was kind of jarring to me, to be honest.
I mentioned it in passing to my brother, kinda complaining about the sudden crowds but later describing it down to details...how people seemed to be taking pics of the ground for no reason...he said "they're playing pokemon go, dummy." I had no idea such a thing existed and thought I was going nuts.
But ultimately what I saw was a lot of people venturing out and about, enjoying the day, having fun solo or in groups... and thought it was a net positive to society, for once, unlike most modern apps and games.
Or…that’s how it used to be.
COVID neutered quite a lot of that. Though in retrospect it was a bit silly to be that scared of being outside…let’s not go there…
But more so, Niantic’s responses really killed in-person gameplay. You had Remote Raids, where you could be invited to join a raid at a gym from a friend. A good idea, but one they never really weaned the player base off of, because it was way easier for players to stay on the couch. (Well, and Niantic made fat bundles of cash off the Remote Raid Passes IAP.)
They also made totally sensible changes to interaction distances—which is to say, they doubled (was it doubled…whatever, a non-trivial increase) the distance you could be away from a Pokéstop or a Gym to interact with it. A really nice change, and one that I think made the game better even outside the pandemic. And they rolled it back, right when Omicron took hold. And they barely spoke a word about any of the changes. It felt fickle. Arbitrary.
I'm not familiar enough to say what they should have done, but whatever they were doing early on was clearly working better.