[Lewisham]

Look at this chart:

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GLc5ve5_djc/V-ysZgW6uDI/AAAAAAAAD...

The worst case scenario was 5x, which was a factor of 10 off. If you are that far off when you do your capacity planning, you can be pretty sure you've got problems throughout your entire stack.

[roninb]

There is literally no way anyone could have expected it to do this well. Nintendo has steered clear of mobile gaming because they expected all of their IP to flop in the mobile world.

That said, what you said is still true. If you're thinking you're going to have 100k users, you might be willing to allow a lot more data to be transmitted and/or processed than if you had 10m users. Just looking at tracker alone, having to transmit and measure distance between a dozen points and ordering them is a lot more work than checking whether a dozen coordinates are within a range and listing them in any order.

[jandrese]

> Nintendo has steered clear of mobile gaming because they expected all of their IP to flop in the mobile world.

I don't believe this for a second. Nintendo knows where its goldmines are. IMHO it is far more likely that they steered clear of mobile because they didn't want to cannibalize their Game Boy sales. It's a classic case of a big corporation being slow to react to change or even trying to stop it because they hold a dominant position in the old system.

Nintendo would much prefer if "mobile gaming" still meant Game Boys but the world has already made their decision and they can't stop it. They can't ignore the sales figures on what would have otherwise been an obscure goofy spinoff fitness app on the Game Boy. They've ignored the mobile market for too long and now there is pent up demand. Without Pokemon Go I doubt you would have seen the sudden scramble to develop and release a Mario game for iPhone.

[mtrpcic]

That chart is not at all accurate. If it were, it would be telling us that over time, they expected no change in data volume? They set a single number as "Expected volume", and a single number as "worst case", with no planning for growth at all? That's what this chart is showing. Either they were so poor at planning that this chart is accurate and the fault is on them, or the chart is inaccurate and we can't really trust any of the data it represents.

[itcmcgrath]

I can guarantee you the chart is accurate as I created it. Yes they did expect change, but the only number that matters for this graph is "how big can we get" and then "if we get that big by the end, is there enough capacity". The answer to to the first one turned out to history making ; no-one in their right mind would bet on happening beforehand, and the second turned out to be "Yes".

[MBCook]

That shows their estimates were terrible.

The article says (in one of the only bits of real information) that they blasted past their estimates with only Australia and NZ just 15m after launch.

Whoever came up with those numbers must have had some serious methodology flaws. I know they couldn't predict that it would become the biggest online game ever for a while, but the initial demand prediction was clearly way off even before it started growing like a rocket.

[KirinDave]

No offense, but your comments are somewhat outrageous to me. I've been on the receiving end of one of those graphs (different scale) because suddenly things happen (we were placed above the apple logo as a feature with no warning AS WE LAUNCHED).

And you're sitting there as the engineering lead or staff going, "How do I even feel about this? Fortunately I have no time to feel because I am off to fight fires." I didn't go home for 2 days, I worked 82 hours that week and >70 the next.

Complaining that the estimates are bad for a product that literally broke everything we know about how to build a successful mobile game and has scaled to a truly unprecedented level is meaningless. Obviously no one expected this. Obviously the engineers wouldn't have wanted it. Obviously the world will respond the way it will to our work.

Show some compassion. But also some humility. None of us are qualified to make projections in the face of phenomena like this.

[bduerst]

>That shows their estimates were terrible.

Pokemon Go became the most-downloaded app in history within the first few days.

Are you saying that's the bar that people should estimate at launch?

[jandrese]

It's hard to estimate with no data. Nintendo had never released any other mobile games and the few NES/SNES ports had modest sales (at admittedly high price points for mobile).

When it comes down to it, the game is closer to a fitness app than a Pokemon game and can be described as bare bones. The fancy accessory wasn't even available at launch. Many of the players are people who have not bought a Pokemon game in over a decade, or ever in some cases.

If there is one area I can solidly criticize Niantic for it is rushing the other region releases so quickly. It's clear the servers were already badly overloaded and they just started adding countries left and right. I know it sucks for people who live in those countries to have to sit out while the rest of the world is having fun, but it's really not much more fun to sit at the eternal loading screen because the backend is entirely on fire.

[petters]

No, it shows that successes like these are impossible to predict.

[BinaryIdiot]

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted into oblivion; you are completely correct. Yes, to address the other points raised, it's difficult to predict how popular something unreleased will be. But this is Pokemon. Their last game release, which is limited to the niche Nintendo 3DS console, sold over 3 million copies in just 3 days. And this was the Omega / Alpha games which were essentially just remakes of older games.

A mobile game, available to be downloaded onto hundreds of millions of phones, that is also FREE? I feel like they broke 100 million in the first day at the latest (counting totals from each region's first day). It wouldn't surprise me if it's significantly higher than that.

Media, users; everyone has been BEGGING Nintendo to release IP to mobile devices but they have kept it locked up in their own hardware. If no one had even a rough idea of the possible popularity they most certainly had a very, very wrong methodology.