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Pokémon GO will get its first huge update this week: 80+ new Pokémon, new items, and more

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gen-2 “When is another generation of Pokémon coming to Pokemon GO?!” It’s a question that the game’s players (including myself) have been shouting since… well, pretty much immediately after the game launched. We’ve finally got an official answer: “later this week”. The once oh-so-shaky servers have stabilized. The game is now available in most of… Read More

The new Pokémon just went live in Pokémon GO and the servers are melting again

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server The good news: the 80+ new Pokémon that were supposed to hit Pokémon GO “later this week”? They just went live. I caught a Chikorita! The bad news: If you were a player in the early days, things might look pretty familiar right now… in that you might just be looking at an error screen. The server seems to be having a hard time at the moment, with players reporting issues… Read More

Revenue, I choose you! The Pokémon Company’s profits jump by 2,500 percent

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 It’s been a banner year for The Pokémon Company: Pokémon GO was a global phenomenon and the latest full-on Pokégame for the 3DS sold very well indeed. One would expect the company to be doing well financially — perhaps even doubling or tripling last year’s profits. Well, apparently it quinvigintupled them, which is to say multiplied by 25 times. (I had to look it up.) Read More

Pokémon Go is getting cooperative play and a new gym system. Here’s how they work

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 Just about a year ago, Pokémon Go came out of nowhere and took over the world. If you lived in any sort of big city, you probably couldn’t go a block without seeing a Go player sprint by, staring at their phone all the while. The hype inevitably died down, of course. Some people caught everything there was to catch; others stopped as the summer nights turned chilly; others simply got… Read More

Crunch Report | Elon Musk Wants To Make Infrastructure Great Again

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Legendary Pokémon come to Pokémon GO, Elon Musk says he has verbal OK to build tunnel on the East Coast, YouTube Live launches in 10 more markets and Intel launches deep learning on a stick with Movidius technology. All this on Crunch Report! Read More

I went to Pokémon GO Fest to (try to) play the game with thousands of others. Here’s what it was like

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 “Do people still play Pokémon GO?” It’s a question that pops up pretty much any time the game gets mentioned. The answer: yep! It’s rarely the sidewalk-filling, flash mob-inducing hype monster that it was for a few weeks after launch — and that’s probably better for everyone. But lots and lots of people do still play. Read More

Here’s the schedule for when Legendary Pokémon will come and go in Pokémon GO

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 Ever since the first Legendary Pokémon (read: ultra strong, ultra rare Pokémon that require groups of 10-20 players to capture) appeared in Pokémon GO shortly after the upset that was GO Fest, one thing has remained unclear: were the Legendaries here to stay? Read More

Escher Reality is building the backend for cross-platform mobile AR

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 Y Combinator-backed, MIT spin-out Escher Reality is building a cross-platform toolkit and custom backend for mobile AR developers — aiming to lower the barrier to entry to building “compelling experiences”. Read More

Niantic’s postponed European Pokémon Go events will now take place in October

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 Good news for Pokémon Go fans in Europe: Niantic has announced new dates for the events in Europe that were postponed following the disastrous outcome of the first-ever Pokémon GO Fest in Chicago in July. The events — dubbed ‘Pokémon GO Safari Zone’ — will be held as follows: October 7, 2017 Fisketorvet—Copenhagen, Denmark Centrum Černý Most—Prague,… Read More

Preschoolers get their own Pokémon game with launch of Pokémon Playhouse

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 A new app called Pokémon Playhouse from the Pokémon Company, released this week, is bringing Pikachu and friends to preschoolers. Unlike the augmented reality game Pokémon Go, a collaboration between Niantic and Nintendo by way of the Pokémon Company, this latest game is not focused on capturing Pokémon, battling and raids. Instead, it’s filled with activities appropriate for… Read More

Pokémon GO fitness gains were short-lived

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During the supreme madness of the Pokémon GO season this summer, it wasn’t uncommon to hear people talk about how the insanely popular game was boosting activity levels and making people walk miles more than they did before. That effect appears to have been significantly overstated, according to research published in the British Medical Journal.

Now, to be clear, this research is real, although the journal, while it is a major one, tends to give itself over to frivolity during the holiday season. That one of the Harvard researchers is dressed as Pikachu while presenting their results is instructive.

The study (noticed by Popular Science) surveyed 1,182 Americans, all of whom had an iPhone 6, and a little under half of whom were Pokémon GO players. The participants were found on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which at this point seems like something of a niche population — but then again, most of what we know about psychology was learned by testing psych undergrads, so we can give this particular sourcing a pass.

At any rate, in the weeks leading up to the game’s release, there was no significant difference between steps taken — automatically recorded by the phone — by the two groups. The week the game came out, however, the Pokémon-playing group showed an average of 955 extra steps per day, while the control group remained near the baseline. These were, of course, the crazy early days of the app, when everyone was walking their feet off trying to catch ’em all.

f1-largeThat thousand-step gain was cut in half by week 4, however, and by week 6 was all but wiped out.

Additional analysis, by the way, showed no significant interaction effect with other variables — age, income, neighborhood walkability, etc. That could be from a lack of data, or it could be that the game just caused comparable increases across the board regardless of other factors.

No doubt there were a few people who walked miles more because of the app, but it doesn’t appear to have been a widespread phenomenon. As the researchers summarize it:

Although the association between Pokémon GO and change in number of steps was short lived in our study, some people might sustain increased physical activity through the game. Also, the effect of Pokémon GO on physical activity might be different in children, who were not included in our study. Other potential benefits might exist, such as increased social connectedness and improved mood.

Pokémon Go arrives on the Apple Watch

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Following an erroneous report claiming that Niantic’s plans to bring Pokémon Go to the Apple Watch were canceled, the company today put those rumors to rest with more than a mere statement: it has now launched the Apple Watch version of its popular game. The new smartwatch app lets you more easily play Pokémon without having to always pull out your phone. Instead, you can tap to find nearby Pokémon, collect items from PokéStops, and even log your gameplay as a “workout.”

The AR and GPS-powered game, which has been downloaded 600 million times as of November, offers a unique combination of gameplay and physical activity that makes sense for a platform like the Apple Watch.

04-watchface

The new app will take advantage of the watch’s fitness-tracking capabilities, as gameplay counts toward your personal Activity rings. In addition, your Apple Watch sessions will count toward hatching your Pokémon Eggs, too, as well as receiving Candy with your Buddy Pokémon.

Regular Pokémon Go players get a lot of exercise, of course. The company recently announced that trainers have walked more than 8.7 billion kilometers in their quest to capture 88 billion Pokémon to date. That’s the equivalent of 200,000 trips around the world, Niantic said.

The new game could encourage people to get out and walk even more.

03-mainscreen

In addition to fitness tracking, Pokémon Go will also tie into the Apple Watch’s ability to push notifications to your wrist. The app will send alerts about a variety of important events, including when there are nearby Pokémon to catch, when you’re near a PokéStop, when your Eggs hatch, and when medals are awarded, says Niantic.

However, when it comes time to actually catch the Pokémon, you’ll still need to break out your iPhone.

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The launch of the Apple Watch app comes shortly after the smartphone app was updated with a number of new features, including the ability to hatch new Pokémon characters originally from the Pokémon Gold and Silver video games, the addition of Ditto, as well as the ability to catch the special edition Pikachu that’s wearing a festive holiday hat.

The company has also been steadily upgrading standard features like the tracker, while collaborating with big brands like Starbucks to serve as destinations for Gyms and PokéStops.

05-egg

However, many of Pokémon Go’s moves as of late have focused on re-engaging lapsed users, too – like the in-game event over Halloween, for example, or the daily bonuses.

Launching on the Apple Watch may give these more casual players a reason to return, as the initial hype around the record-breaking game begins to wear off.

02_pokestop

Niantic had first announced there would be an Apple Watch app at Apple’s September event, and just this week, its code was found to have references to Apple Watch features. However, some have been concerned whether the company would meet its earlier stated deadline of reaching the Apple Watch before year-end.

The app is rolling out now in all markets where Pokémon Go is available.

DeepMind’s updated AlphaGo has been secretly savaging pro players online

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Pokémon GO might have been the most talked about “Go” game of 2016, but the world of AI remains fixated on another Go — AlphaGo.

Last spring, Go-playing AI AlphaGo made headlines when it defeated world champion Lee Sedol. Now AlphaGo is in the news for another reason. DeepMind’s freak of computing has been anonymously vanquishing the world’s top Go players online.

A mysterious Go player, only referred to as “Master” on the internet, had been causing a stir for days, confusing top Go players with its unusual play. The style of gameplay led many to speculate that the stealthy player was not human, and perhaps even a reincarnation of AlphaGo.

All of this was confirmed in a tweet from DeepMind’s CEO Demis Hassabis.

For thousands of years, humans have sharpened their Go skills by studying human players. Putting a computer into the equation changes everything. Strategies that appear flawed on paper to game experts can actually disorient human masters.

One thing AlphaGo did have going in its favor was speed. The matches were played at a rapid pace, providing little time to sort out these unexpected moves.

Hassabis noted that the updated AlphaGo would be returning to play official, full-length matches later in the year. It’s clear that, leading up to those matches, humans will be on the defensive.

With a streak of 60 wins and the defeat of reigning Go champion Ke Jie, DeepMind’s AlphaGo is making the same mark on the game of Go that IBM’s Deep Blue made on chess. After Kasparov lost to IBM’s creation, humans created Arimaa, a modification of chess designed to stump computers and give humans the edge. This time, humans are equally stunned, but perhaps less resistant.

From an AI perspective, DeepMind’s accomplishment can be interpreted as something of a social experiment — a hyper-Turing test, so to speak. On one hand, it was clear that AlphaGo could at least play toe to toe with human players. It’s also true that such an imposing winning streak would draw attention and accusations of being inhuman.

But somehow the feat still manages to be impressive in the way that it’s making humans question themselves. Even if humans are quickly losing their grip on the game of Go, there’s a lesson hidden somewhere in the carnage — taking humans out of the loop, even for a brief amount of time, can teach us new ways to approach problems created by millennia of closed-mindedness.

Pokémon launches Duel, a new free iOS and Android strategy battle game

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Pokémon has another official new mobile game that isn’t Pokémon GO – it’s a strategy battle game called Pokémon Duel where you collect virtual figures and fight them in an attempt to take over territory from your rival.

The Duel element involves actually battling your figures, which you can select in teams of six. These individual Pokémon have stats, including how many steps they can move in a turn, and different attacks. You can use your figures both to defend your territory and to attack the enemy’s.

This is a free game, but as you might expect, there are in-app purchases that can help make you more likely to succeed; you can use “plates” to boost your Pokémon’s powers, for instance, as well as Boosters, and you can trade currency earned in-game for new Pokémon. There’s also a league play mode that lets you compete with real human opponents at any time from the home screen.

pokemon-duel

Those figures look an awful lot like Nintendo’s Amiibo, the NFC-enabled figures that work with games on the Wii U and 3DS, as well as on the upcoming Switch, but no compatibility with those real figures are announced yet.

You can grab Pokémon Duel on either the App Store or Google Play now, and get to battling. It’s a very different take on Pokémon than either the main series or Pokémon GO, but it takes a lot from card battlers and tactics games, which sounds like a winning combo.

Nintendo reports $569M profit as Pokémon game sales get off to good start

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Nintendo only takes a fraction of the revenue from Pokémon Go, the smash hit game of 2016, but its popularity has certainly boosted its own Pokémon games as evidenced by the company’s latest financial report. Nintendo reported a 64.7 billion JPY ($569 million) profit on revenue of 174.3 billion JPY ($1.5 billion).

That’s a return to the black following a $57.1 million loss in the previously quarter. Revenue was down 22 percent year-on-year, but Nintendo beat analysts expectations and it has raised expected profit for its annual financial report — due in May — to 90 billion JPY ($791 million) from 50 billion JPY ($440 million).

The firm spotlighted its Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon titles for the 3DS, which it said have clocked a combined 14.69 million in sales since launch in November. Super Mario Maker was top release, surpassing the one million mark during the recent quarter. That in turn drove hardware sales, Nintendo said, particularly overseas — Nintendo 3DS sales came in at 6.45 million, up 10 percent year-on-year, with the number of titles sold jumping 20 percent to hit 46.78 million.

Nintendo also released its much-anticipated first Mario game for mobile in December. Mario Run for iOS racked up a record 40 million downloads in its first four days, but Nintendo didn’t gave any further insight into how the game has done since then, or how much money it has grossed. The game will land on Android in March, so perhaps we’ll get more color in the next quarter. Another title, Fire Emblem Heroes, will be Android-first when it drops on February 2, but a third title — Animal Crossing — has been delayed.

Also coming soon is the Switch, Nintendo’s next flagship console, and that likely contributed to falling Wii U sales. Nintendo did say that the console’s performance “conformed to our expectations” with 0.76 million units sold in the last quarter. That’s down 75 percent year-on-year, with game sales also down 45 percent to reach 12.48 million. Nintendo also said revenue from amiibo character sales remained stable. Generally, revenue from digital was unchanged over the past tear due to the “relatively fewer offerings of downloadable content” on offer.


Report: Pokémon Go has now crossed $1 billion in revenue

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Pokémon Go was 2016’s rocket ship — it broke download records and it raced to $500 million in revenue quicker than any app in history. Now it won yet another accolade, the fastest game to reach $1 billion.

That’s according to a new report from app analytics firm Sensor Tower. To give the record some context, a recent App Annie report estimated that iOS and Android developers earned around $35 billion combined last year. Pokémon Go did $1 billion in just over six months, and without a launch in China, the world largest smartphone market. That’s faster than other billion-dollar games Candy Crush Saga and Puzzles & Dragons.

Sensor Tower drilled the point home via a chart comparing Pokémon Go revenue to that of another top mobile game — Clash Royale from SuperCell. Clash Royale did around $550 million in its first seven months. SuperCell is renowned for producing high grossing and addictive games, yet Pokémon Go leaves it trailing in its wake.

pokemon-go-one-billion-revenue

Sensor Tower estimates that Pokémon Go is far less lucrative now than at its peak — it is said to be making $1.5 million to $2.5 million per day, down from record highs of $18 million — but the team behind the app has the nous and loyal fanbase to raise that on occasions.

For example, it can add new characters and run special events. A Halloween-period event was estimated to have doubled the game’s revenue, while there’s potential to increase engagement via the newly launch Apple Watch app, too, and generation two Pokémon Go is still to come.

There are also more markets. The app just went live in South Korea, one of the planet’s most lucrative mobile gaming markets, and Niantic can explore the possibilities of a China launch, where it must contend with issues around government concern and a lack of Google services.

So, while there’s little doubt that the hype around the game has died down, there remains much to be upbeat about.

Watch how Portal would work in the real world thanks to Microsoft HoloLens

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Valve’s Portal series is one of the more beloved in PC gaming, thanks to its debut of unique puzzle mechanics to inject some fresh life in the tired first-person action genre. The game looks even more interesting when you’re using its unique mechanics overlaid on the real world, with virtual objects interacting seamlessly with concrete things like tables, walls and floors.

That’s exactly what happens in the tech demo above, which was created by Kenny W, a developer working on augmented reality games, and whose previous projects include equally impressive functioning AR takes on the Pokémon franchise.

Kenny’s latest project puts Portal’s signature portals in VR, along with a companion cube that interacts not only with the portals themselves, but also with physical surfaces and objects including the kitchen table and a staircase.

HoloLens in practice doesn’t take up your whole field of view like you might imagine from this demo video, but it’d still be a very impressive use of Microsoft’s first foray into end-user AR.

Microsoft: Please help make this a real HoloLens consumer launch title.

Pokémon GO will get its first huge update this week: 80+ new Pokémon, new items, and more

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gen-2

“When is another generation of Pokémon coming to Pokemon GO?!”

It’s a question that the game’s players (including myself) have been shouting since… well, pretty much immediately after the game launched.

We’ve finally got an official answer: “later this week”.

The once oh-so-shaky servers have stabilized. The game is now available in most of the world. And now, about seven months after the game’s initial launch… it’s finally time for a bunch of new Pokémon.

Niantic tells me that players will be able to find “over 80” new Johto Pokémon (those from 1999’s Pokémon Gold and Silver games, otherwise known as “Generation II”) within the next few days.

I asked for a date more precise than “later this week”, but the company declined to get more specific. When asked whether the new Pokémon would be added all at once or rolled out gradually, though, a rep replied that they would all “be discoverable as soon as the update goes live.”

Better news: the 80 they mentioned will all be discoverable “in the wild”, as they should be — not just from eggs, unlike the handful added in December.

A few other things the company confirmed:

  • New “evolution” items required to make certain Pokémon evolve are being added. Niantic tells me that evolution items will come from PokéStops, much like eggs/Pokeballs/etc. I wish they’d gotten a bit more creative there — it’s a good opportunity to add some sort of new gameplay mechanic.
  • Two new types of berries are coming: Nanab berries, which make Pokemon slower and thus easier to hit, and the Pinap Berry, which doubles the amount of candy you get if your next catch attempt is a success.
  • New avatar items — new hats, shirts, and pants are mentioned specifically.
  • They mentioned new “encounter gameplay”, but they didn’t shed too much light on what that means


They also released this trailer:

Though there’s not much in terms of new encounter gameplay mechanics on display there, worth noting is the new berry shortcut button at 0:16, that the backpack is seemingly now a dedicated Pokéball drawer, and that the camera button got moved up to the top of the screen (until 0:29, at which point it’s suddenly back at the bottom right. Whoops!)

Also worth noting: from 0:20 to 0:26, people are very clearly shown playing the game in mountains, woods, etc — the sorts of areas that the game has notoriously been pretty bad at populating, instead dumping lots and lots of Pokémon in Walmart parking lots. Wishful thinking by the trailer directors, or something more?

Alas, not mentioned thus far with regards to this update: a better tracking system, trading, or player-versus-player battling.

Anyway: this is by far the biggest batch of Pokémon added to the game since launch — we got Ditto back in November, a goofy little Pikachu in a Santa hat in December, and a handful of baby Pokémon that you could frustratingly only get from eggs (read: walking + random luck + maybe some premium items to speed up the process).

“But wait, Greg! Didn’t Generation II originally add 100 Pokémon, not ~80?”

Yeah, that’s where things get a little fuzzy. Niantic tells me “over 80” are being added, which leaves 20 sort of up in the air. 8 of those remaining 20 are the aforementioned babies(/their evolutions), and are already in the game. That leaves 12 — some of which will probably require those evolution items so Niantic isn’t counting them as discoverable “in the wild”, and 6 of which are presumably the Gen II “Legendary” Pokémon. Based on what we’ve seen with Gen I’s (still absent) Legendaries , those seem to be poker (Poké?) chips Niantic is hanging onto for later plans.

How exactly it’ll all break down, though, will be figured out as soon as the players (Shout out to Silph Road and r/PokemonGo!) actually get their hands on the new content. That sense of discovery as everyone works together to catalog everything is half the fun.

Will this update spark the same level of insanity that was seen with the game’s initial launch? Probably not. Does it need to? Nah. It’ll bring back a chunk of players who dropped off because they ran out of things to do, for sure — but striving for that same degree of ubiquitous and game-breaking popularity would be a fool’s errand.


And for the folks who’ve made it this far and thus might care about the nitty-gritty, a few things I noticed in some screenshots they sent over:

berries

1) Sup, Murkrow?
2) That’s the new berry drawer, as teased in the trailer
3) Looks like berries can be purchased now, given the Shop icon in the upper right

evolve

1) Pokémon in GO seem to have genders now, with an icon marking which gender-variant you’re looking at.
2) That silhouette on the “Evolve” button, assuming it’s part of the final release, suggests the button will now show what a Pokémon will evolve into when it’s tapped. With the addition of evolution items allowing one Pokémon to have multiple possible evolutions, this should help prevent any surprises.

The new Pokémon just went live in Pokémon GO and the servers are melting again

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The good news: the 80+ new Pokémon that were supposed to hit Pokémon GO “later this week”? They just went live. I caught a Chikorita!

The bad news: If you were a player in the early days, things might look pretty familiar right now… in that you might just be looking at an error screen. The server seems to be having a hard time at the moment, with players reporting issues logging in and sporadic crashes.

Hopefully these issues are just temporary hiccups as the new stuff falls in place. (And man oh man, is it fun to see silhouettes in the tracker again.)

Revenue, I choose you! The Pokémon Company’s profits jump by 2,500 percent

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It’s been a banner year for The Pokémon Company: Pokémon GO was a global phenomenon and the latest full-on Pokégame for the 3DS sold very well indeed. One would expect the company to be doing well financially — perhaps even doubling or tripling last year’s profits. Well, apparently it quinvigintupled them, which is to say multiplied by 25 times. (I had to look it up.)

The news comes courtesy of TechCrunch (CrunchGear, technically) alum Serkan Toto, who noticed the line item in Japan’s Kanpo gazette. Private companies don’t have to report all their financials, but many post a summary in the gazette regularly.

Last year’s net profit was a mere $5.6 million, down from $18.4 million the year before that (probably owing to Pokémon X&Y sales). But this year’s net profit? ¥15.92 billion, or $143.3 million. That’s more than 25 times last year’s take.

We knew the game was printing money, of course — it had reportedly created a billion in revenue as early as February. Unfortunately, there’s no exact breakdown of these enormous amounts; for example, how much came from in-app purchases and how much came from sponsorship deals. We recently found out that McDonalds and others are paying surprisingly large sums to… lure customers to their stores.

The gravy train won’t stop there, either. Who knows how much they’re making from Magikarp Jump?

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