We all remember where we were when we saw it on the news. Previously deserted neighborhoods flooded with people from all walks of life looking for them, flooding parks and shopping areas. In the blink of an eye they were among us and the country was changed forever… Pokemon.
Pokemon Go has been out since July 6th in the United States and quickly became the global phenomenon everyone was talking about. It was covered by nearly every news station you turned on with people wandering the streets, leaving their houses and helping many of us have a good reason to leave our house and not only seek Pokemon, but see people.
However, after many updates and just the length of time it has been out Pokemon Go has lost quite a large majority of it’s player base, or at the very least the amount Pokemon Go is getting people to run out in droves has gone down significantly. Which brings us to today as College students across the country have moved in or back to school for their fall terms. While many of us have played Pokemon Go in a random survey of students very few played the game as much as they use to, while a majority played casually as they walked to class or did homework and a fair amount of people have quite all together.
This isn’t too surprising with the changes to the game (most notably the tracker) being changed drastically from it’s original style making it much harder to track the Pokemon you want to capture and just hoping you get lucky. However, with Augie it is surprising that more people aren’t playing because we have an absurd number of Pokestops, great Pokemon in a variety of locations and a decent amount of gyms on campus to keep people entertained in our small area without having to venture out too far from home to catch anything that isn’t a Weedle or Pidgey.
Many people I talked to recently said that it wasn’t that the game got worse, except for the tracker, more so that they just got tired of the same old game over and over. It was wonderful to relive your childhood at first for a while going around catching all the Pokemon you could find, but, just like running into Zubats in a cave you eventually just get tired of the same old thing over and over again.
There is no denying the numbers are in decline and that people are tired of the same old thing. So my question is, will Pokemon Go continue to lose it’s fan base or have we nearly hit the plateau where those who are playing are the die hard fans who will play until they have quite literally, caught them all? Many say that the introduction of a battle system like in the games of old would make them come back in a heart beat. Since they’ve already worked on adding trading into the game it’s not unlikely to say that battling is too far down the line.
Personally, with the possibility of a battle system and 5 more generations of Pokemon to add into the game I think Pokemon Go will be just fine. As long as they don’t wait too long to add more and fix the tracker Pokemon Go will have Valor, Mystic and Instinct going toe to toe in the streets all over again someday soon.
Griffin Gletty