Niantic have recently announced that their break-away hit, Pokémon GO, has surpassed 500 million downloads. Which is approximately 1/15th of the entire global population…which is insane.
This coincides with the announcement that Pokémon GO will be coming to the Apple Watch, which is actually the first time I’ve thought of the Apple Watch as being a cool gadget, as otherwise it seemed to me like an overpriced gimmick. Anyway, the facts to speak for themselves with Pokémon GO, over half a billion downloads and over 4.6 billion kilometers walked (“which is the distance from Earth to Pluto.”), a new style of gaming is emerging in 2016, that Niantic call “real world games” which I’m sure will advance beyond just Pokémon GO in the years to come.
Games that people can play whilst getting fit are nothing new, the Nintendo Wii pioneered this a decade ago which is why it was the most popular console (in terms of sales) of the last gen, and spurred Sony and Microsoft to try and follow suit to varying degree’s of success. Niantic have pioneered this new style of game and we’ll wait for the imitators to come thick and fast. Perhaps a zombie style of game where you get alerts that zombies are nearby and you have to get away…
What do you think? What kind of “Real World Game” would you like to see? Let us know in the comments below or in the RGM Forums.
