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Pokemon GOCredit: Niantic
If you don’t play Pokémon GO, you might not see how this is such a big deal. But developer Niantic Labs’ announcement today is arguably one of the biggest additions it has made to the game so far, right up there with raids and social mechanics. The developer just announced "adventure sync", a new functionality that will allow the game to track the distance you travel even when the game is idle. No, it doesn’t sound like a lot. But that sound you hear is the jaws of longtime players hitting the floor.
Pokémon GO was already halfway to a fitness app, but this more or less completes the transition. Tracking distance can be tough on a normal basis, requiring you to keep the app running, draining the battery and otherwise monopolizing your phone. It means that Pokémon GO almost always takes place during intentional play sessions, where you’ve got your phone up, looking for creatures. If I play on the way to the grocery store I don’t play on the way back because I’m carrying bags.
This changes all that. Adventure Sync works its magic by linking up to extant fitness apps on your phone like Apple Health and Google Fit. Which is itself a huge deal: the pedometers of those apps are much more accurate than the GPS tracking in Pokémon GO, and so it means you’ll be able to get miles by jogging, hustling around as a waiter, or maybe even running on a treadmill, though that’s not tested.
Which is great, on so many levels. For one, my kilometres tracked are about to skyrocket. For another, this further encourages physical activity in a way the game just wasn’t equipped to do before. If I want to slam out all my incubators on a brisk jog while listening to music, I can do that! If I want to use this as a genuine gamified fitness tracker, I can do too. It incorporates the game into life on a much more complete level, which adds to the whole fiction of the game. Your trainer is not the avatar on the screen: you are the trainer.
But don’t get me wrong, this isn’t all altruistic on Niantic’s part. This is going to make Niantic a ton of money, and not just from the general sense of getting people more engaged with the game. One of the main reasons you wrack up distance in the game is to hatch eggs, but you can only hatch as many eggs as you can buy incubators. And considering this dramatically increases your ability to hatch eggs, it should also dramatically increase your need for incubators.
You could make the argument that giving people more miles would actually make them buy less incubators because they can make more effective use of the one free one, but I’d disagree. Pokémon GO, like most mobile games, relies heavily on high spending players. And those players–I count myself– are just going to keep buying incubators. This is one of those rare systems that equally benefits free players and paid players, however.
I’m looking forward to taking this for a spin, and I hope to see it in Harry Potter: Wizards Unite at launch.
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Pokemon GOCredit: Niantic
If you don’t play Pokémon GO, you might not see how this is such a big deal. But developer Niantic Labs’ announcement today is arguably one of the biggest additions it has made to the game so far, right up there with raids and social mechanics. The developer just announced “adventure sync”, a new functionality that will allow the game to track the distance you travel even when the game is idle. No, it doesn’t sound like a lot. But that sound you hear is the jaws of longtime players hitting the floor.
Pokémon GO was already halfway to a fitness app, but this more or less completes the transition. Tracking distance can be tough on a normal basis, requiring you to keep the app running, draining the battery and otherwise monopolizing your phone. It means that Pokémon GO almost always takes place during intentional play sessions, where you’ve got your phone up, looking for creatures. If I play on the way to the grocery store I don’t play on the way back because I’m carrying bags.
This changes all that. Adventure Sync works its magic by linking up to extant fitness apps on your phone like Apple Health and Google Fit. Which is itself a huge deal: the pedometers of those apps are much more accurate than the GPS tracking in Pokémon GO, and so it means you’ll be able to get miles by jogging, hustling around as a waiter, or maybe even running on a treadmill, though that’s not tested.
Which is great, on so many levels. For one, my kilometres tracked are about to skyrocket. For another, this further encourages physical activity in a way the game just wasn’t equipped to do before. If I want to slam out all my incubators on a brisk jog while listening to music, I can do that! If I want to use this as a genuine gamified fitness tracker, I can do too. It incorporates the game into life on a much more complete level, which adds to the whole fiction of the game. Your trainer is not the avatar on the screen: you are the trainer.
But don’t get me wrong, this isn’t all altruistic on Niantic’s part. This is going to make Niantic a ton of money, and not just from the general sense of getting people more engaged with the game. One of the main reasons you wrack up distance in the game is to hatch eggs, but you can only hatch as many eggs as you can buy incubators. And considering this dramatically increases your ability to hatch eggs, it should also dramatically increase your need for incubators.
You could make the argument that giving people more miles would actually make them buy less incubators because they can make more effective use of the one free one, but I’d disagree. Pokémon GO, like most mobile games, relies heavily on high spending players. And those players–I count myself– are just going to keep buying incubators. This is one of those rare systems that equally benefits free players and paid players, however.
I’m looking forward to taking this for a spin, and I hope to see it in Harry Potter: Wizards Unite at launch.
