What Pokémon GO Needs to Keep Thriving: Veteran MMO Game Designer Raph Koster Explains

"Augmented Reality is an MMO" is a widely-discussed analysis of Pokémon GO by veteran MMO game designer Raph Koster, explaining why the AR-based blockbuster is basically a massively multiplayer online game that's soon to encounter many of the problems MMOs face, with those problems now threatening to impact the real world even more. (As they're starting to already.) Since this is the first augmented reality hit and since so many play it (including me), I asked Raph what Pokémon GO's developer, Niantic, should do to keep its virtual economy stable and help insure the game itself doesn't become a short-term fad.

"They need to create a sense of interdependence between players, so that other players are always seen as a mutual benefit," Raph tells me. "They need to provide support/redress facilities for problems, and anticipate that the problems will arise."

But how to build interdependence? "Roles is the classic way." He means something like classic MMO classes such as tank, healer, etc, but “it doesn't have to be those. After all, goalie, striker, midfielder, defender are also roles.”

Perhaps an even greater concern is how Pokémon GO's virtual economy is managed:

"Seems clear it's an inflationary system right now, very few drains," says Raph. (A drain or "gold sink" is a game mechanic which removes virtual currency or valuable items from the game economy, to reduce inflation.) "If [player-to-player] trading comes, real money trading will happen instantly... Once there is trade, it's classic Mudflation." (I.E., where the value of virtual items in a game become grossly over or under-valued based on player supply and demand.)

"It's pure faucet. The creatures never die. That's where value pools. Mudflation ahoy."

As for maintaining Pokémon GO usage over the long term, Raph has a very interesting suggestion there:

"If they want it to live over the long haul, it will have to support expert play. Pokémon fans are hardcore, memorize giant piles of data, optimize collections, gather rates, hack and cheat, and so on. That's the core audience here and who will monetize over time. They are already complaining about shallow battle mechanics. If it is just a feel-good toy, it'll fade back in prominence quite a lot..." That sounds right to me, though as any MMO developer can tel you, it's extremely difficult to keep both the super hardcore minority and the more casual majority of players both equally happy.

Anyway, go read more analysis of GO from Raph on his blog.

Image via SimilarWeb.

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Comments

[Adeon Writer]

The problem is Pokemon has never been an MMO. The main series has always been a singleplayer game, and yes, Pokemon never die in Nintendo's world, no matter how many fights they lose or how long they get abandoned - and it's too late to change that.

The kicker is currently the game only includes Generation 1 Pokemon (series of pokemon are referred to as Generations, with Gen 1 being the 151 characters on the original 90's)

So as far as avoiding being a fad, they only have to start releasing the Gen 2 characters as soon as profit starts dipping. Then Gen 3. Then 4. The games are currently on 7, so that's 7 major updates to keep the game alive.

Plus they can do smaller updates like add the very popular Pokemon-Amie features which turns Pokemon from a collectathon to a virtual pet mini-game.

Lots of room to expand - this is Pokemon. They know what they're doing.

[Hawk]

Well, as soon as you added trading between players, the original Pokemon games became mmos. They became games where the actions of many other players might or might not impact you.