Ask HN: What Happened to Pokémon Go?

1 pointwcerfgba2 comments

This was one of the fastest growing, and most popular, mobile apps/games of all time, and then it fizzled out. Now nobody even talks about it. Has anyone done a post mortem or analysis about what happened to cause this phenomenon to fade almost as quickly as it flared up?

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Issues at the peak of popularity caused people to abandon it. Once they abandoned, they never came back.

1) Servers were swamped and had difficulty scaling to match performance to users resulting in downtime.

2) Not enough skill curving, it made being a casual very difficult because you would get stomped in gyms/battles.

3) Not enough mitigation against GPS spoofing/cheating further killed the incentive for casuals.

4) Over-monetization resulted in pay-to-win conditions.

My wife still plays but I got overwhelmed by the sheer number of pokemon that exist now.

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