Last week during my visit to my friends in University of California at Irvine(UCI), my flight was delayed for quite a while, and I didn't manage to get into the campus until nearly 2 in the morning. I thought that it was going to be all quiet and dark around, but I was totally wrong. Students were walking and running around all over the street with their phones' screens flashing in their hands. Immediately I learned that they were all playing "Pokemon Go," the mobile and augmented reality version of the games we are all familiar with as a child. It has gained an insane amount of media exposure and is claimed to have taken one life and several injuries because people are too into it while walking and driving.
Another thing that went crazy with the game players is Nintendo's stock, whose price had skyrocketed all the way from $14,935.00 three days ago when Nintendo initially published the game in App Store to $20,260.00 today at 3:10 p.m., when I just checked it. As a long-term stock investor, my faith in value-investment is not strong enough to resist such temptation. The problem for me is that there are too many signs suggesting the boom of the stock price before it happens. The game was so popular right after its release on Friday that the server went down several times over the past weekend. When I was walking down the streets of Los Angeles on Saturday, only one day after the initial release, there were already massive amounts of college kids walking around the shopping center trying to catch Pokemon. All this happened before the stock market's opening on Monday, so I always feel there is space for short-term operation. Though without further investigation, it is questionable whether the game will bring long-term profits to Nintendo, in the short-term, such historical popularity is enough to raise the stock price.
What is also worth notice is that so far "Pokemon Go" is the only Augmented Reality game that gained considerable success. It is the first one, but won't be the last one. Thanks to "Pokemon Go," we get to have a glance over the immense business potential of AR games. Unlike the traditional Pokemon games, where the background is set in an artificial maps based on the major regions in Japan like Kanto, Johto, "Pokemon Go" directly uses the real world as the map and your actual location will be your character's position in the game. It is like we are living in two worlds, one in the reality and one in the Pokemon world, all in the same geographical location. Such correspondence brings some funny stories. One poor man whose house is labeled by the game as a gym where the Pokemon trainers can fight against each other.
This is what I'm a little leery of. People pulled up, blocking my drive way as they sit on their phones. pic.twitter.com/WpRbilk6g6
— Boon Sheridan (@boonerang) July 10, 2016
Since in the game, the most competent trainers can claim the ownership of the gym by beating others, now the property has two owners in the two parallel worlds. It seems that the poor man above later met the owner of his house in the "Pokemon Go" world.
Woohoo! I met the owner of my gym. Nice guy. pic.twitter.com/uujdC3JYbA
— Boon Sheridan (@boonerang) July 10, 2016
Businesspeople, as fast as usual, have already smelled the money lying inside. Some restaurant owners took advantage of their location being Pokestop (where players can get supplies) in the game world to attract customers, like the two below.
Since the players have to move physically in reality to relocate their avatar in the virtual world, some entrepreneurs started to offer Uber-Style rides for "Pokemon Go" players to where the Pokemon appear, so the players can comfortably concentrate on catching their favorite little monsters. The message behind all of these is that the developers of the virtual reality games now have the power to influence the popularity of places in the real world!
For example, Niantic (developers) can sell the Pokeshop status to cafeteria, restaurants and other spots at a very lucrative price considering the additional influx of customers such feature is already bringing. Certifying sponsorship for special game events have always been a decent business for Nintendo in the past, and it will be more so with the AR feature. There are many potential options to explore, and the business world should pay close attention to it because it will be a profound revolution that unveils a new era of disruptive technology inventions.
