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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 bored and moved on. The game still has a sizable player base — about 65M people, as of April of this year — but for the most part, gone are the overwhelming crowds of people running through the street because someone spotted a Snorlax.

The game’s second summer is just around the corner — and with that in mind, it’s about to get one of its biggest updates yet.

I got to check out an early build of the coming update last week, which the company tells me they’re hoping to roll out this week (with some of the bigger features taking a bit longer to show up for everyone.) Here’s whats new:

New Gyms:

Pokémon Go “gyms” are in-game/real-world spots that players try to claim for their team.

Pokémon Go’s existing gym system sucked. It was confusing at best, and broken at worst. Every gym consistently has all of its slots filled with the same two or three ultra-strong Pokémon, greatly limiting the use of the hundreds of other Pokémon available in the game.

Meanwhile, gyms previously tapped a not-super-intuitive “prestige” system that determined how many Pokémon could be in a gym at once, capping out at ten. Training a gym your team owned would raise the number; repeatedly beating another team’s gym would boot one of their Pokémon out.

With new gyms:

  • Only one of each Pokémon will be allowed at a time — no more gyms filled with ten Dragonites, or maxed-out Blissey armies.
  • Each gym will now hold up to six Pokémon, with all six slots opening as soon as a gym is conquered.
  • You’ll battle Pokémon in the order in which they were added to a gym, instead of fighting them from weakest to strongest.
  • All six Pokémon occupying a gym are shown at once, ditching the goofy old interface that showed one at a time
  • Pokémon will now lose “motivation” over time and/or whenever they are defeated, temporarily lowering their maximum combat power. When a Pokémon’s motivation hits zero, they leave the gym. Any player on the same team can feed a gym’s Pokémon berries to lift their motivation.
  • Each gym now has a badge you can earn and level up from Vanilla -> Bronze -> Silver -> Gold. This is smart — it gives players a new reason to play while traveling beyond the occasional regional Pokémon, collecting distant gym badges as little mementos.
  • You can now “spin” gyms like you would a Poké Stop. Once a day, gyms will give you a ‘raid pass’ (assuming you don’t already have one; you can only have one at a time.) What’s a raid pass, you ask? They let you participate in…

Cooperative Raids:

A glowing egg appears on top of a gym, a countdown floating just above it.

The countdown hits zero; the egg hatches. An ultra rare Pokémon emerges — a Tyranitar, lets say. It’s got some insanely high combat power; a Tyranitar we battled during my demo time, for example, had 19,000 CP. If you took it on by yourself, it’d almost certainly wreck everything you threw at it without batting an eye.

Fortunately, you get to work with others (up to 20 players) to take it down. Players from any team can participate in any raid; there’s a bonus to owning a gym when a raid starts (more on that in a second), but it’s not mandatory.

And if you win? You get to catch that Pokémon — or, at least, you get to try. After a battle, you’re awarded a number of premier balls — a special Pokéball that only works in post-raid encounters, and the only Pokéballs you can use there. Your ultra balls do nothing here. The number of premier balls you get (and thus the number of chances you get to try to catch a defeated raid boss) are determined by things like your performance in the battle and whether your team was controlling the gym when it started.

(For the curious: even with nine premiere balls, using new-and-improved golden razz berries, and nailing a few curve balls, I didn’t catch the raid boss Tyranitar. So it’s by no means guaranteed.)

When you first tap into a raid, you’re placed into a public lobby made up of other nearby raiders. Only want to battle with your friends and avoid the randos? You can generate a private lobby code and take on the raid with just your crew.

Raids will roll out over a few weeks (high level players will see them first), starting at sponsored gyms.

Niantic also tells me that they’re playing with the idea of “invitational” raids — a system that’ll reach out to specific “dedicated” trainers (presumably meaning high level players) in a region and invite them to raids only they can participate in. They didn’t want to say too much about that, though. The company also confirmed Legendary Pokémon (uber rare Pokémon that have yet to make an appearance in the game beyond a few hacks/accidental cases) as being potential raid bosses, though they declined to say more.

How much notice will you get before a raid begins? Minutes? Hours? Days? And how often will raids occur? Those questions dramatically alter how raids will feel, and how they’ll play out. They need to be common enough to give people on varying schedules an opportunity to participate and rally their friends, but rare enough to make them feel particularly epic or exciting. Niantic says they’re still “tuning the numbers” there.

New Items:

A couple other new items are being brought into the mix that can only be obtained through raids:

  • Rare Candy: to evolve a Pokémon in Go, you need a bunch of that Pokemon’s “candy”… which you get by catching more of that Pokémon. This makes evolving certain Pokémon a total pain, as you need to catch dozens of them. Rare candy, meanwhile, will work for any Pokémon.
  • Golden Razz Berries: like standard Razz Berries, these increase the likelihood that your Pokemon will stay in a Pokeball you’ve thrown. These are just considerably more effective. They’ll can completely refill the motivation of a Pokémon in a gym.
  • Fast TMs and Charged TMs permanently teach Pokémon a new attack.

A few things that didn’t appear to have changed in this update: the battle mechanics (it’s still all about hammering taps to attack and swiping to dodge), and the Pokemon tracking system (it still focuses mostly on showing Pokemon currently near local Pokestops, versus the distance-based ‘Nearby’ system the game initially launched with that focused on what’s around you). And no, no word of trading or PVP battles yet.

Will this update be enough to rekindle the absolutely insane levels of hype Pokémon Go saw at launch? Of course not. Pretty much nothing could recreate that perfect storm of nostalgia and excitement that caused a few hundred million people to become Pokémon trainers overnight. It’ll get people playing in visible groups again and respark the interest of some people who’ve dropped off, but it’s probably not going to be the overwhelming, server-crashing inundation it saw last summer. And that’s probably for the better.

But it does take smart steps to recreate the feeling of the beginning — of showing up to a place because the game pointed you in that direction, only to end up working with a bunch of strangers to catch some Pokémon. Done right, gym raids will call experienced players together to one spot (and one, that if it’s survived as a Gym to this point, presumably doesn’t mind having Go players show up randomly) and team up for an ephemeral-but-hopefully-fairly-epic experience.

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Crunch Report | Elon Musk Wants To Make Infrastructure Great Again

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Today’s Stories 

  1. YouTube TV triples its footprint with launches in 10 more U.S. markets
  2. Legendary Pokémon are headed to Pokémon Go
  3. Movidius launches a $79 deep-learning USB stick
  4. Elon Musk says he has ‘verbal’ okay to build multi-state underground Hyperloop

Credits

Written by: Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Hosted by: Tito Hamze
Filmed by: Joe Zolnoski
Edited by: Joe Zolnoski

Notes:

  • I don’t know what to wear on Crunch Report (It’s a hard decision and I suck at dressing myself). If you are a startup and want to me to wear something mail me an XL T-shirt and I’ll wear it in an episode. I’m not going to mention the company on the shirt in the episode but it will be there. No offensive stuff, it’s totally at my discretion if I wear it. Mail it to me. Thanks <3 Ok, bye.

TechCrunch C/O Tito Hamze
410 Townsend street
Suite 100
San Francisco Ca. 94107

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.

Enough people that the game can still be found floating around the iOS App Store’s Top 20 grossing apps. Enough people to fill a big ol’ park that otherwise hosts events like Lollapalooza.

That was the idea behind Pokémon GO Fest. It would be a real-world gathering of many thousands of Pokémon GO Players in Chicago’s Grant Park, all playing together, catching some Pokémon (some of which were meant to appear there for the first time) and working toward a common goal. As a Pokémon GO player from the game’s earliest days, I was genuinely excited to go.

Alas… Pokémon GO Fest didn’t work. Within minutes of the gates opening, technical issues brought everything to a grinding halt — where it stayed for most of the day. Here’s what it was like to go.

(Use that right arrow to advance to the next picture; if you’re on mobile, just scroll)

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?

Niantic had multiple in-game events/bonuses running in parallel with scheduled ending times, and no one seemed to know if these ending times also affected Legendaries. Everyone seemed to have heard something different, and no one really seemed to have a clear answer.

Niantic CEO John Hanke has just released the most official answer yet, releasing a proper schedule for the comings and goings of the next few Legendaries to hit the game.

Here’s what it looks like:

  • Articuno (Team Mystic’s mascot) was released on July 22nd and will be available through Monday, July 31st
  • Moltres (Valor’s mascot) will be released on Monday, July 31st and will be available through Monday, August 7th
  • Zapdos (Instinct’s mascot) will be released on Monday, August 7th and will be available through Monday, August 14th

Curiously, no word yet on whether Lugia (the other Legendary released on July 22nd) will hang around.

It may seem weird to have something come and go like this — particularly something that most players will want and be upset to miss. But releasing them all at once would keep people interested for a day or two, max — staggering them like this keeps them popping back in for weeks at a time.

And will these birds ever make appearances down the road, after their initial in-game stints are through? No word on that yet, either — but I’d bet on yes. It would be a bit weird (and self-defeating) if newcomers were never able to get their hands on them. For many, Pokémon has always been about completing a collection; if your collection will always be missing some of the game’s most substantial ‘mon, why bother?

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

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The potential of mobile augmented reality is clear. Last summer Pokemon Go gave a glimpse of just how big this craze could be, as thousands of excited humans converged on parks, bus stops and other locations around the world to chase virtual monsters through the lens of their smartphones.

Apple was also watching. And this summer the company signaled its own conviction in the technology by announcing ARKit: a developer toolkit to support iOS developers to build augmented reality apps. CEO Tim Cook said iOS will become the world’s biggest augmented reality platform once iOS 11 hits consumers’ devices in fall — underlining Cupertino’s expectation that big things are coming down the mobile AR pipe.

Y Combinator -backed, MIT spin-out Escher Reality’s belief in the social power of mobile AR predates both these trigger points. It’s building a cross-platform toolkit and custom backend for mobile AR developers, aiming to lower the barrier to entry to building “compelling experiences”, as the co-founders put it.

“Keep in mind this was before Pokemon Go,” says CEO Ross Finman, discussing how he and CTO Diana Hu founded the company about a year and a half ago, initially as a bit of a side project— before going all in full time last November. “Everyone thought we were crazy at that time, and now this summer it’s the summer for mobile augmented reality… ARKit has been the best thing ever for us.“

But if Apple has ARKit, and you can bet Google will be coming out with an Android equivalent in the not-too-distant future, where exactly does Escher Reality come in?

“Think of us more as the backend for augmented reality,” says Finman. “What we offer is the cross-platform, multiuser and persistent experiences — so those are three things that Apple and ARKit doesn’t do. So if you want to do any type of shared AR experience you need to connect the two different devices together — so then that’s what we offer… There’s a lot of computer vision problems associated with that.”

“Think about the problem of what ARKit doesn’t provide you,” adds Hu. “If you’ve seen a lot of the current demos outside, they’re okay-ish, you can see 3D models there, but when you start thinking longer term what does it take to create compelling AR experiences? And part of that is a lot of the tooling and a lot of the SDK are not there to provide that functionality. Because as game developers or app developers they don’t want to think about all that low level stuff and there’s a lot of really complex techs going on that we have built.

“If you think about in the future, as AR becomes a bigger movement, as the next computing platform, it will need a backend to support a lot of the networking, it will need a lot of the tools that we’re building — in order to build compelling AR experiences.”

“We will be offering Android support for now, but then we imagine Google will probably come out with something like that in the future,” adds Finman, couching that part of the business as the free bit in freemium — and one they’re therefore more than happy to hand off to Google when the time comes.

The team has put together a demo to illustrate the sorts of mobile AR gaming experiences they’re aiming to support— in which two people play the same mobile AR game, each using their own device as a paddle…

What you’re looking at here is “very low latency, custom computer vision network protocols” enabling two players to share augmented reality at the same time, as Hu explains it.

Sketching another scenario the tech could enable, Finman says it could support a version of Pokemon Go in which friends could battle each other at the same time and “see their Pokemons fight in real time”. Or allow players to locate a Gym at a “very specific location — that makes sense in the real-world”.

In essence, the team’s bet is that mobile AR — especially mobile AR gaming — gets a whole lot more interesting with support for richly interactive and multiplayer apps that work cross-platform and cross device. So they’re building tools and a backend to support developers wanting to build apps that can connect Android users and iPhone owners in the same augmented play space.

After all, Apple especially isn’t incentivized to help support AR collaboration on Android. Which leaves room for a neutral third party to help bridge platform and hardware gaps — and smooth AR play for every mobile gamer.

The core tech is essentially knitting different SLAM maps and network connections together in an efficient way, says Finman, i.e. without the latency that would make a game unplayable, so that “it runs in real-time and is a consistent experience”. So tuning everything up for mobile processors.

“We go down to, not just even the network layer, but even to the assembly level so that we can run some of the execution instructions very efficiently and some of the image processing on the GPU for phones,” says Hu. “So on a high level it is a SLAM system, but the exact method and how we engineered it is novel for efficient mobile devices.”

“Consider ARKit as step one, we’re steps two and three,” adds Finman. “You can do multi-user experiences, but then you can also do persistent experiences — once you turn off the app, once you start it up again, all the objects that you left will be in the same location.”

Consider ARKit as step one, we’re steps two and three.

“People can collaborate in AR experiences at the same time,” adds Hu. “That’s one main thing that we can really provide, that Google or Apple wouldn’t provide.”

Hardware wise, their system supports premium smartphones from the last three years. Although, looking ahead, they say they see no reason why they wouldn’t expand to support additional types of hardware — such as headsets — when/if those start gaining traction too.

“In mobile there’s a billion devices out there that can run augmented reality right now,” notes Finman. “Apple has one part of the market, Android has a larger part. That’s where you’re going to see the most adoption by developers in the short term.”

Escher Reality was founded about a year and a half ago, spun out of MIT and initially bootstrapped in Finman’s dorm room — first as a bit of a side project, before they went all in full time in November. The co-founders go back a decade or so as friends, and say they had often kicked around startup ideas and been interested in augmented reality.

Finman describes the business they’ve ended up co-founding as “really just a nice blend of both of our backgrounds”. “For me I was working on my PhD at MIT in 3D perception — it’s the same type of technology underneath,” he tells TechCrunch.

“I’ve been in industry running a lot of different teams in computer vision and data science,” adds Hu. “So a lot of experience bringing research into production and building large scale data systems with low latency.”

They now have five people working full time on the startup, and two part time. At this point the SDK is being used by a limited number of developers, with a wait-list for new sign ups. They’re aiming to open up to all comers in fall.

“We’re targeting games studios to begin with,” says Finman. “The technology can be used across many different industries but we’re going after gaming first because they are usually at the cutting edge of new technology and adoption, and then there’s a whole bunch of really smart developers that are going after interesting new projects.”

“One of the reasons why augmented reality is considered so much bigger, the shared experiences in the real world really opens up a whole lot of new capabilities and interactions and experiences that are going to improve the current thoughts of augmented reality. But really it opens up the door for so many different possibilities,” he adds.

Discussing some of the “compelling experiences” the team see coming down the mobile AR pipe, he points to three areas he reckons the technology can especially support — namely: instruction, visualization and entertainment.

“When you have to look at a piece of paper and imagine what’s in the real world — for building anything, getting direction, having distance professions, that’s all going to need shared augmented reality experiences,” he suggests.

Although, in the nearer term, consumer entertainment (and specifically gaming) is the team’s first bet for traction.

“In the entertainment space in the consumer side, you’re going to see short films — so beyond just Snapchat, it’s kind of real time special effects, that you can video and set up your own kind of movie scene,” he suggests.

Designing games in AR does also present developers with new conceptual and design challenges, of course, which in turn bring additional development challenges — and the toolkit is being designed to help with those challenges.

“If you think about augmented reality there’s two new mechanics that you can work with; one is the position of the phone now matters,” notes Finman. “The second thing is… the real world become content. So like the map data, the real world, can be integrated into the game. So those are two mechanics that didn’t exist in any other medium before.

“From a developer standpoint, one added constraint with augmented reality is because it depends on the real world it’s difficult to debug… so we’ve developed tools so that you can play back logs. So then you can actually go through videos that were in the real world and interact with it in a simulated environment.”

Discussing some of the ideas and “clever mechanics” they’re seeing early developers playing with, he suggests color as one interesting area. “Thinking about the real world as content is really fascinating,” he says. “Think about color as a resource. So then you can mine color from the real world. So if you want more gold, put up more Post-It notes.”

The business model for Escher Reality’s SDK is usage based, meaning they will charge developers for usage on a sliding scale that reflects the success of their applications. It’s also offered as a Unity plug-in so the target developers can easily integrate into current dev environments.

“It’s a very similar model to Unity, which encourages a very healthy indie developer ecosystem where they’re not charging any money until you actually start making money,” says Hu. “So developers can start working on it and during development time they don’t get charged anything, even when they launch it, if they don’t have that many users they don’t get charged, it’s only when they start making money we also start making money — so in that sense a lot of the incentives align pretty well.”

The startup, which is graduating YC in the summer 2017 batch and now headed towards demo day, will be looking to raise funding so they can amp up their bandwidth to support more developers. Once they’ve got additional outside investment secured the plan is to “sign on and work with as many gaming studios as possible”, says Finman, as well as be “head down” on building the product.

“The AR space is just exploding at the moment so we need to make sure we can move fast enough to keep up with it,” he adds.

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, The Czech Republic
October 14, 2017
Mall of Scandinavia—Stockholm, Sweden
Stadshart Amstelveen—Amstelveen, The Netherlands

Those are in addition to others which remain on course to take place this month:

September 16, 2017
Unibail-Rodamco Shopping Centres located at CentrO in Oberhausen (Germany), Les Quatre Temps in Paris (France) and La Maquinista in Barcelona (Spain)

The events are designed to bring a community feel to Pokémon Go by encouraging people to get outdoors to collect rare Pokémon, and compete in battles and raids.

That’s the plan at least. Unfortunately the Chicago event — the first of its kind — was a gigantic mess.

Around 20,000 people attended the weekend event, including many visitors who flew in, but technical issues upstaged the hype and broke the event. Most of the attendees unable to access the service as servers crashed under the load and local cell towers struggled to handle the demands of so many players in the same place.

Niantic issued refunds — in the form of $100 of virtual currency inside Pokémon Go — but that didn’t stop some disgruntled fans from filing a class-action lawsuit because they had shelled out on traveling to Chicago without knowing it would be a write-off.

The company hasn’t said anything new today about how it plans to ensure the issues will not be repeated in Europe. At the time of the postponement of the first events — which were initially scheduled for August — it said it needed more time “to ensure a great experience for Pokémon GO Trainers in Europe and around the world.”

The events are increasingly important for Niantic.

Pokémon GO was a smash-hit last year, with Apple revealing it to be it the most-downloaded iOS app of 2016, but interest has cooled significantly this year. The app is still among the top 50 in the App Store and millions still play it every day, but it has been reported that four out of five users have quit.

Niantic has tried to revive interest by issuing special releases of new Pokémon and new features, but the offline component is a smart stimulus.

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 those ages 3 to 5 years old.

For example, young players can take care of their Pokémon in a ‘Pokémon Grooming’ activity, or they can look for Pokémon in the night sky in the ‘Search the Stars’ feature. They can also doing things like start a band with Pokémon, feed them treats, or take them to an interactive park, as well as solve simple puzzles or listen to stories.

Many of these activities are reminiscent of the sorts of things you’d see in other childrens’ apps, like those from Toca Boca or Furby, for example.

In addition, a human character guides players through the activities, to make it more accessible to young players.

As for the Pokémon themselves, the company says the game will include “never-before-seen expressions of Pokémon” such as Pikachu, Bulbasaur, Litten, and Snorlax.

The game advances as the young trainers continue to play. As they complete the various in-app activities, they get closer to hatching eggs that feature new Pokémon to add their collection. In total, there are over 50 Pokémon included in the game.

According to The Pokémon Company, the new game is meant to introduce Pokémon to a younger audience because it believes the property should be for all ages.

“Playhouse offers our youngest fans the opportunity to explore the world of Pokémon in an environment made just for them,” said J.C. Smith, senior director of Consumer Marketing at The Pokémon Company International, in a statement. “As the popularity of the Pokémon brand continues to grow, we’re thrilled to launch the first-ever Pokémon preschool expression with Pokémon Playhouse, offering parents an age-appropriate and entertaining experience for the littlest Trainers in their family.”

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And while the Pokémon Go game is wildly popular – having crossed $1.2 billion in revenue and 752 million downloads as of this summer – that game can also be a little challenging for preschoolers.

Parents will also be glad to know that, unlike Pokémon Go, Pokémon Playhouse won’t have kids begging for money for in-app purchases. The game itself is a free download, and all its content is free as well.

Rather, it seems the goal with Pokémon Playhouse is to generate interest in the world of Pokémon at a younger age, which will eventually lead kids to Pokémon Go when they’re older. And that benefits Nintendo, given the company gets a 19 percent cut of Go’s total revenues, it’s been reported. Pokémon Go’s success also had a halo effect on Nintendo’s hardware sales, and The Pokémon Company makes money by licensing its brand to toy makers like TOMY and Wicked Cool Toys.

Pokémon Playhouse is available for both iOS and Android.

Niantic’s follow-up to Pokémon Go will be a Harry Potter AR game launching in 2018

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Niantic Labs had tremendous success with Pokémon Go, which paired their expertise in building location-based augmented reality mobile experiences with a top-flight IP with a ravenous fan base. So, it stands to reason that we should expect a similar fan response to Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, an AR title set to launch in 2018, co-developed by Warner Bros. Interactive and its new sub brand Portkey Games.

Niantic building a Harry Potter game similar to Pokémon Go was rumoured last year, when the company noted that it had acquired the rights to the app. But the rumour was subsequently debunked, oddly enough, with the original article containing the information pulled from the web.

The app is now official, but the details are still scarce, with the launch timeframe of just sometime next year, but it sounds like there will be significant influence from the Niantic game Ingress, which allows players to roam the real world collecting power-ups, defending locations and exploring their environment.

The mechanics of Ingress would actually translate pretty well to the fictional Harry Potter universe, and seems almost ready-made for a fantasy spell casting coat of paint to replace its science-fiction special forces veneer. Also, like Pokémon Go, it could benefit from the location database built up by Ingress originally (and expanded by the Pokémon title) to incorporate real-world locations into the in-game experience.

Update: Here’s a link to the official announcement for Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.


Pokémon Go creator raises $200 million ahead of Harry Potter game launch

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Pokémon Go creator Niantic has raised a new $200 million in funding, reports The Wall Street Journal. The Series B raise was led by Spark Capital, and includes participation from Founders Fund, Meritech, Javelin Venture Capital, You & Mr. Jones and NetEase, Inc. Spark partner Megan Quinn is also joining Niantic’s board as part of the new financing deal.

Niantic is known for its augmented reality games, which began with the multiplayer sci-fi spy game Ingress, created during the company’s time as an internal startup founded within Google. In 2015, Niantic spun out as its own entity, and it launched Pokémon Go in July, 2016. The Pokémon AR game managed to attract massive interest at launch, resulting in huge real-world gatherings of players thanks to its mechanic of incentivizing players to move around in the real world to achieve in-game success.

In its Series A round, Niantic raised $30 million in funding from an investor group including Alsop Loui Partners, Google, Nintendo, The Pokémon Company, Cyan and Scott Banister and others. Earlier this year, Niantic announced its first acquisition, of mobile social network developer Evertoon, and it also recently made official its intent to build a mobile AR game based on Harry Potter.

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is due out sometime next year, and will be developed in partnership with Warner Bros. Interactive.

Pokémon GO gets a surprise new legendary: Ho-Oh

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A bit of a surprise just dropped for everyone poking around Pokémon GO this holiday season: a new legendary Pokémon, Ho-Oh.

Niantic usually debuts legendary Pokémon (the massive, super strong Pokémon that require groups of up to 20 players to take down and capture) with a bit of fanfare, but this one showed up pretty much out of nowhere. If you weren’t paying attention to Niantic’s social media feeds or actively watching the nearby raids screen, it’d be easy to miss.

Especially because it sounds like it’s only going to be here for a little while — Niantic says Ho-Oh will only appear in raid battles until 12/12.

Hands-on with Nintendo’s Poké Ball Plus

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Nintendo doesn’t come out with a ton of hardware in-between system launches, but the peripherals it does come out with have a history of being pretty quality. That being said, the Poké Ball Plus may be the nicest little game-specific system accessory Nintendo has sold yet.

At Nintendo’s big, honking E3 booth I had a chance to go hands-on with the little golf-ball sized device. Nintendo was not allowing us to take video or pictures of it during use, but rest assured, this is exactly what it looks like in real life.

For what should by all means be a gimmicky little device, Nintendo put a thoughtful amount of engineering into the little ball, which was surprisingly fun to play the new titles with and seemed to offer a lot more than nostalgia for prospective owners.

Build-wise this thing feels nice and hefty with an experience that feels a bit more immersive than using a Joy-Con because you are holding a little ball rather than flicking a controller. Additionally, there are some lights on the joystick/trigger that light up to showcase when you’ve caught a Pokémon or are housing one. You can charge the Poké Ball Plus via USB-C and you’ll get about six hours charge on it, the company tells us.

You can navigate your character through the game with the joy-stick and push it in to make selections. When it comes to actually capturing Pokémon that you encounter, you can sort of flick the little ball — there’s a strap and a little ring to ensure the ball doesn’t go flying.

Will this be something that drastically improves your experience playing the varieties of Pokemon: Let’s Go? No, but you probably won’t feel like an idiot for spending extra money on something your system’s Joy-Cons can already do if more fun is an acceptable system spec.

It’s cool, it’s cute and tiny and, similar to the Pokémon GO Plus wristband, you’ll be able to connect this to your phone and catch the little creatures on-the-go, so you are getting some added functionality if you’ve bought into Niantic’s Pokémon world on mobile, as well.

Other features beyond being able to house a Pokémon that you have captured on the move is that you can actually shake the device and hear the sound of the particular Pokémon you currently have captured. As far as fun little features go, this has a lot to offer fans.

We don’t have an official price for the accessory itself, but Nintendo did reveal today that it will be included with a $100 bundle with a copy of Pokemon: Let’s Go Pikachu or Eevee. You’ll also get the mythical Pokémon Mew with your Poké Ball Plus.

Pokémon Quest hits app store with a jolt

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Coming just shy of a month after its original release on the Nintendo Switch, Pokémon Quest has hit the the App Store and Google Play Store today with an impressive response. According to analytics by Sensor Tower, the app on iPhone is already at No. 2 in Japan and No. 3 in Korea. While hovering at No. 5 in the U.S., the momentum looks like it could carry it to No. 1 by the end of the day.

The game itself is designed to be an easily accessible, free-to-play RPG that features your favorite pokémon from Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue — with a geometric twist.

Taking a left-turn from their typical animation style, the pokémon in Quest have been transformed into cube versions of themselves and inhabit a brightly colored — also 90-degree angled — terrain called Tumblecube Island. After choosing a pokémon companion to begin your quest, trainers are tasked with exploring the island for hidden treasure.

But if Minecraft-ified Pokémon is not exactly your cup of tea, don’t worry, Nintendo has more up its sleeves.

In a joint announcement in Tokyo this May, Nintendo, the Pokémon Company (the group behind Quest) and Niantic (the creators of Pokémon GO) announced a plan to release four new Pokémon titles by 2019.

Pokémon Quest jump-starts that plan and two new Switch titles  — Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee! — are slated to be released to the Switch in November. A yet untitled “core” game is scheduled to be released by the end of 2019.

The companies plan to begin weaving these platforms, games and fans together, including allowing users to transport their pokémon from GO to the Switch titles and the creation of a “real” Poké Ball for the Switch.

It’s too early to speculate on the success of these grand plans, but it’s an exciting prospect for pokémon trainers worldwide.

Niantic explains how and why it bans players in Pokémon GO

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Getting banned for cheating is nothing new in Pokémon GO. There’ve been big ol’ ban waves every few weeks for ages now.

The policies have never been totally set in stone, however — at least not publicly. Like many of the game’s mechanics, the player base has had to share info amongst themselves to figure out the offenses and their relative punishments, from slaps on the wrist to lifetime bans.

At long last, Niantic has published a proper “Three-Strike Discipline Policy.”

As the name implies, most infractions will be handled on a three-strike system. Niantic notes, however, that “some misbehaviors” (they leave that one pretty open-ended) will work out to an instant perma ban.

So what’s worthy of a strike? Spoofing (making the game think you’re somewhere you’re not), using modified Pokémon GO clients or bots or doing something that accesses Pokémon GO’s backend in an unauthorized way.

On the first strike, you’ll get a warning message. You’ll still be able to play, technically, but you won’t see anything even remotely rare for seven days.

On the second strike, they’ll close your account for a month.

On the third strike, the account is banned for good.

And if you think you got stuck in the crosshairs by accident? Niantic has an appeal process for that.

It’s worth noting that these punishments aren’t really new; bans of all variety have been happening since shortly after the game’s release. This is just the first time Niantic has really put the hows-and-whys in stone.

Niantic could probably go a few steps further in their clarifications here, though, as plenty of players are still confused as to whether or not they’re breaking the rules.

Will they get in trouble for using third-party software (like an automated IV calculator) that doesn’t modify the client or access Niantic’s backend but does provide the player with more info? What about players using third-party versions of the Go Plus hardware, like the Go-tcha? That thing pretty much automates catching/spinning as you walk around… but it’s also been sold in retail stores for years now, likely to many players who’ve never considered that this thing they bought in their local GameStop might not be allowed.

Pokémon GO is getting PvP by the end of the year

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As popular as Pokémon GO is, it has always been missing one major feature: pitting your Pokémon directly against another trainer’s. Strange, since that was the entire basis of the franchise to begin with! But the mobile game will at last get this much-requested feature by the end of the year, the company told Polish news site Gram.

After a record-shattering debut and then a long slump as players perceived the game’s shallowness and abandoned it en masse, Pokémon GO is having something of a renaissance. Improved gym and social mechanics, better reliability and, of course, a host of new ‘mon have brought players back, and it seems that features will continue to be rolled out.

What exactly the PvP mode will consist of is not clear. Chances are it will require players to be near each other, like the trading function. Though it is likely to produce some kind of reward, it likely will be limited in some other way, via a stardust or candy cost, to prevent people gaming the system.

Niantic’s Anne Beuttenmüller, in her interview with Gram, didn’t get specific. She was more interested in talking about the upcoming Ingress Prime, a sort of relaunch of the game on which Pokémon GO is essentially based; that will also be released toward the end of the year.

As for the highly anticipated Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, which will no doubt involve people waving their phones around and uttering magic nonsense in full view of the public, her lips were sealed. It too will release around the end of the year! It’s going to be a busy holiday season.

Twitch will livestream Pokémon TV series and movies, while viewers ‘catch’ badges

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Twitch has teamed up with The Pokémon Company to allow viewers to binge watch the Pokémon: The Series TV show and related movies on its site, and “catch” Pokémon badges along the way. While the former is one of Twitch’s many retro binge watch fests – it’s previously streamed old shows like Bob Ross, Julia Child, Mister Rogers, SNL, and most recently, Knight Rider – the interactive feature it’s debuting is something new.

According to the company, Twitch will launch its own Pokémon extension to accompany the broadcast. This overlay, called “Twitch Presents: Pokémon Badge Collector,” will encourage viewers to collect Pokémon badges that appear on the screen for points, which places them on a leaderboard.

This is only the second time Twitch has added an interactive element like this to one of its viewing events, and its addition could see users watching for longer periods of time, as a result. The first was a “watch and win” extension during a Doctor Who broadcast, but it was different as it focused on collecting contest entries.

Twitch also notes this will be the longest viewing event it’s ever held.

The binge will see 16 movies and 19 TV seasons with 932 episodes streamed across Twitch’s network, starting on August 27, 2018, and spanning until 2019. This will kick off with the first season, Pokémon: Indigo League at 10 AM PDT on the 27ths for audiences in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Latin America, and Australia. The content will air on TwitchPresents and on its companion channels in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese.

“The Twitch community has a passion for Pokémon based on the warm embrace the series received when we celebrated the brand’s 20th anniversary, as well as the cultural milestone that was set when over a hundred thousand Twitch members played Pokémon together,” said Jane Weedon, Director of Business Development at Twitch, in a statement about the launch.

The viewing event comes at a time when reports claim Twitch is going after a wider audience than just gamers. The company has been wooing creatives like vloggers, cooks, artists, and others to come to its site, instead of only broadcasting on YouTube. And it’s been airing non-esports content through marathon events like this new one with Pokémon. According to Bloomberg, TV show livestreams are one of the two fastest-growing genres on the site, the other being “IRL” (in real life) content.

The Pokémon viewing event, in particular, is aimed at a younger audience who may not have the level of nostalgia for the classic TV shows Twitch previously aired. Instead, Twitch says the livestream is appropriate for fans 13 and up – which means it could attract those whose first real exposure to Pokémon was the mobile game that went viral following its launch in 2016.

The dates and times of the Pokémon series and movies will be on Twitch Presents. The binge fest won’t include newer series, like the Sun & Moon or Sun & Moon Ultra Adventures, however.


That weird nut Pokémon that showed up in Pokémon GO? It’s official now

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This past Saturday, something pretty weird happened in Pokémon GO: Immediately after the monthly “Community Day” event came to a close, a strange, new, never-before-seen Pokémon showed up. And by “showed up,” I mean it was everywhere. Around the globe, this thing was spawning every few feet. A grey blob with a hex nut for a head; it wasn’t like anything that anyone had seen in-game before.

It looked like this:

Weirder yet: No one could actually catch it. If you managed to get it to stay in a Pokéball, it would always turn into something else (in most cases, it turned into a Ditto). Just a few hours later, it was mostly gone.

Was it just a glitch? Many players assumed that Niantic put this thing in as a placeholder and a glitch brought it into public view. Or did they really just drop an entirely new Pokémon into the game out of nowhere?

Three days later, we’ve got an answer: It’s not a glitch.

This video just popped up on the official Pokémon YouTube channel, shining a bit of light on what’s going on:

In short: Its name is Meltan, and it’s an upcoming Mythical Pokémon. It all seems to be a big publicity tie-in with the upcoming Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Let’s Go, Eevee! titles that’ll launch on the Switch next month. Based on the limited info we have so far, it seems like to get a Meltan in the new games, you’ll have to catch him in Pokémon GO.

This whole stunt was pretty damned clever. Thanks to special, limited-time spawns, Pokémon GO’s Community Day events are when just about anyone who still plays the game will be actively looking at their screen. By sneaking Meltan in there for a bit at the end, they pretty much guaranteed a wave of “WTF?” would roll around the world. All for a little grey blob with a nut on his head.

As for how to catch an actual Meltan rather than a Ditto-lookalike: that’s still a mystery. Catching Mythical Pokémon in GO thus far has involved “Special Research” quests — a series of tasks that take a few days or weeks of play to complete. We might be looking at another one of those here.

Pokémon GO will get Gen IV Pokémon “soon”

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It’s been about 10 months since the last big batch of Pokémon (Gen III, as it’s known) started rolling out in Pokémon GO. At this point, if you’re still playing GO, you’ve probably caught just about everything there is to catch.

Missing that feeling of adding something new to your Pokédex? Good news: Gen IV is “arriving soon”.

Confirmation of the looming launch comes by way of a teaser trailer just dropped by Niantic and The Pokemon Company:

Sadly, “soon” is about as specific as they’re getting right now.

While Gen 4 (otherwise known as the “Sinnoh” generation) is made up of about 107 new Pokémon, I wouldn’t expect all of those to land at once. If Niantic’s past rollouts are any indication, it’s going to be staged in gradual chunks. Hell, even some Gen II Pokémon still haven’t shown up in the game (lookin’ at you, Smeargle!)

Though the teaser trailer doesn’t promise any specific Pokémon, the starters are all there: you see Turtwig’s twig, Chimchar’s silhouette, and a pack of Piplup swimming beneath the ice. (Oh, and that looks like Giratina’s glowing red eyes at the end there)

Meanwhile, in a separate blog post, Niantic touched on potentially controversial changes on the way:

  • The recently debuted weather system will soon have less of an effect on what Pokémon appear.
  • A “greater variety” of Pokémon will appear in a given area, and “at different rates”, suggesting changes to spawn patterns and perhaps the nest system.
  • They’re adjusting stats across the board (CP/HP/Defense/Stamina) to “narrow the gap” between most Pokémon and the strongest few.

While Niantic is presumably making these changes to make more Pokémon worthwhile beyond the same 10-15 maxed out ‘mon generally found sitting in gyms (with many hoping this means a new PVP battle system is on the way), it’s… a tough one to pull off. With the game having been out for over 2 years now, many players have spent hundreds of hours beefing up certain Pokémon to work within the game’s current mechanics. Shift up the stats, and everything changes.

Pokémon GO update bringing ‘mon from the Sinnoh region is live

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If you’ve been laying off the Pokémon GO for a while due to a lack of new monsters, prepare to be glued to your phone again. Niantic is now adding pokémon from the rugged Sinnoh region that first appeared in 2007’s Diamond, Pearl and Platinum games.

Of course, it’s not so simple as a dump of a hundred new ‘mon into your area. The new guys are arriving in waves, likely meaning the most common sorts will start appearing today, while cooler ones and sets of themed critters will arrive over the coming weeks.

These are part of the Generation 4 set, but it’s not clear yet which will be appearing first or indeed at all. It’s entirely up to Niantic and you can be sure they’re going to mete out these little guys over several months, interspersed with other events — anything to keep you catching.

Everyone will probably have a Chimchar on their shoulder soon, because that sucker is cute, but ultimately everyone is going to want a Dialga. I get the feeling they’re going to be a regular feature at gyms soon. I for one will be working to evolve a Glaceon.

There are also some new evolutions, so don’t trash your mid-tier pokémon just yet. Magmortar, Electivire, Tangrowth and Rhyperior mean you’ll have a use for all that extra candy.

Update your app and start draining that battery, Trainer! And don’t forget that we’ve got Niantic’s Ross Finman at our AR/VR Session in LA this Thursday. Drop by if you’re in the area.

Niantic confirms that Pokémon GO is getting PvP battles ‘soon’

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Two and a half years after the launch of Pokémon GO, it’s still missing one major staple of the main series games: player versus player battling.

That’s about to change.

In a series of teaser tweets this morning, the company confirmed that the battle system is on the way, noting only that it’s “coming soon.”

Battling is the feature perhaps most demanded by the player base — particularly after the other oh-so-demanded feature, trading, was finally added around six months ago. While players have long been able to battle Pokémon stored in gyms, or work together to take down bigger/badder Pokémon that show up in raids, there’s never been the sort of real-time, head-to-head battling system for which the series is so well-known.

In August of this year, a rep for Niantic mentioned that their goal was to get it out by the end of the year. Given these tweets, it’s looking like that’ll happen.

Niantic finalizes its Series C at $245M with a valuation of nearly $4B

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We’ve known since around December that Niantic (the company behind Pokémon GO and the soon to be released Harry Potter Wizards Unite) was in the middle of raising a ton of money for its Series C round. At the time, it looked like it’d come in around $200 million.

The company has just officially announced the round, disclosing the final amount: $245 million.

Niantic says that the round was led by IVP, and backed by aXiomatic Gaming, Battery Ventures, Causeway Media Partners, CRV and Samsung Ventures. They also confirmed that the company’s current valuation is “nearly” $4 billion, as rumored when word of the round was first floating around.

This raise comes just as Niantic is plotting its next steps, post overwhelming Pokémon success. It’s just about to launch another game based on massively nostalgic IP with Wizards Unite, all while working on slowly opening up its armory of AR frameworks (and its massive database of locational points of interest) for third-party developers to build upon.

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