Yet I've seen a lot of comments of people who really enjoy the augmented reality part of it, which was inherited largely from Ingress. Sure, the Pokemon IP is a huge part of the reason it took off. But the reason people actually like it is much bigger than that.
Because of how people, including myself, are using the game I think comparison to social networks is more than fair. I have never seen more people out downtown wandering around and talking to strangers.
well it's purely anecdotal I'll say but everyone I know is playing Pokémon Go right now and before only my really really "nerdy" friends played Ingress.
I take it you've never played Ingress before? Because they've had outages before, particularly during some of the larger events.
Just because something doesn't get widespread news doesn't mean it's unpopular. Sure, Go is massively popular in its own right and to scale beats out Ingress but it's not like Ingress was some 2-bit game that nobody played. Half the mechanics of Go came from there, if Ingress sucked and was a failure they a) wouldn't have put the same features in Go, and b) probably wouldn't have even made Go.
tl;dr Please stop shitting on something you have zero experience with.
Look I'm not shitting on it. It's not orthogonal that you both saw large numbers of people playing it and that it wasn't as popular as Pokémon Go. I'm not saying it's a technological failure, I'm saying it didn't capture as many people's attention in the same way that Go did.
The camera part may seem gimmicky and getting in the way of gameplay, but you can't deny it's a large part of the virality of the game - people posting photos of Pokemon sitting on toilets, park rangers posing with Pokemon with a joke about wildlife - it's marketing genius.
