Pokemon Go Case Analysis

What’s the destination of Pokémon GO?

• The number of players is declining. Here is the plan to retain players.

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Executive summary

Pokémon GO creates miracles in AR game area, but it still cannot get rid of the product life cycle and is facing the problem of the active player defection. In this report, the objective is to find out the reasons for the decline and provide a suitable strategy for Pokémon GO. The report will be displayed by three dimensions of player experience, including interaction, technical support and external influence, to analyze the deteriorated emotion towards Pokémon Go. While emotion plays an important role in creating desired player engagement and loyalty, it is believed that negative emotion generated by unpleasant player experience like the unwillingness to go outside to hunt for Pokémon, or the bug of location is the key reason of the decline of Pokémon Go. Thus, a retention strategy set has been proposed for the sake of maintaining the popularity of the game through enhancing player experience on interaction, technical support and external influence levels.

Current Situation

Strengths

The success of Pokémon GO is unprecedented for several reasons. Most importantly, the biggest advantage of Pokémon GO is fans base. As Pokémon GO was first introduced as a card game which has become popular in 1990s, it has already fostered strong culture among its fans. When Pokémon GO mobile phone game was launched, it released powerful subculture influence and attracted numerous downloads. By adopting the classical Nintendo background music and familiar Pokémon images, this game also successfully arouses players’ emotion reaction with the help of its sensory system, which is indeed significant when players receive and respond to information. Thanks to Pokémon’s loyal fans, they created great buzz for Pokémon GO in social media. With these player-generated “advertisements”, Pokémon GO could easily attract new players in the beginning. Driven by bandwagon effect, potential players are more willing to try what their friends recommend and download this pop mobile game.

Apart from its huge fans base, Pokémon GO also takes advantage of being the first game combining augmented reality with local-based service technique. Unlike traditional virtual games, you can catch Pokémon in “real” environment. With the nature of curiosity, players are always excited about novel things. This location-based game has magic to induce its players to walk a certain distance to collect Pokémon, which to some extent has encouraged sofa potatoes to walk outside successfully.

How much profits can be earned through in-app purchase may be a game company’s first concern. Lucky for Pokémon GO, the numbers of players aged 25-34 occupies 35%, which mainly consume the nostalgia, and have both the willingness and financial ability to spend more money on premium property in game. The surprise comes from its monetizing approach, Pokémon GO finds an excellent way to cooperate with local retail stores—to encourage player to visit locations to satisfy their need. This win-win strategy effectively boosted Pokémon GO’s revenue.

Weaknesses

While this revolutionary game does achieve a huge popularity, it has difficulties as well.

Firstly, the game version is not totally adapted by different local conditions. In other words, the game does not perform well when facing different culture context such as religions and government policies, resulting in a problem especially prevalent in Asia. This is the reason that the game encountered obstacles both in China and India.

Secondly, its app still has a certain number of technical problems to work out. For example, how to overcome the technical barriers to unlock the Chinese market and how to fix the bugs like “GPS signal not found” error. In addition, the game design is not so satisfying as it does not have adequate interface information to help new players who have never been exposed to any version of Pokémon before to understand the game characters easily and quickly. What’s more, a surprising number of Poke stops are in inappropriate locations, such as private places and graveyard. Catching pocket monsters in these locations is a terrible experience for game players and brings troubles to others.

Another obvious shortcoming is that it does not provide a social platform where players can connect and communicate with each other within the game. The lack of social function is disadvantageous to keep people’s interest in the long term.

Moreover, Pokémon Go drains battery of mobile devices very much and uses a lot of data. Players have to carry a power bank and always be in internet-connected environment when they want to play the game. This inconvenience will lead to the reduction of game enthusiasm and interest.

Some reports hold the view that the game endangers players' lives as it requires players to focus on the screen while exploring the real world, which increases the chances to meet accidents and get injured.

Strategic options

Pokémon Go is suffering from its rapid decline. The game has only about 5 million daily players in April 2017, indicating an 80% drop since last summer (Duwell, 2017). In the following paragraphs, the reasons why players quit will be analyzed with a proposed context-specific framework on basis of the relevant literature.

Many economists assume that consumers are rational; however, the decision-making is frequently affected by their emotion, which is a key factor of affecting customer satisfaction. (Achar et al.) Also, emotionally-engaged customers are the most profitable customers to firms as they will repeat buying, increase their spending and show off their experiences to others. (Pine and Gilmore, 1999) In other words, positive emotion will contribute to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty whereas negative emotion will inhibit buying behavior.

In this case, due to the nature of mobile game and the large amount of interaction between individuals and Pokémon GO, emotion plays an important role in creating desired player engagement and loyalty. It is believed that negative emotion generated by unpleasant player experience is the key reason of the decline of Pokémon Go. Since there is no generalizable framework with which to study the factors affecting the emotion of mobile game players, three dimensions of player experience has been created to analyze the deteriorated emotion towards Pokémon Go, including interaction, technical support and external influence.