I firmly believe that had Niantic been allowed to mimic the traditional Pokemon PvP, it would have been an even greater success.<p>The core gameplay of the Nintendo games wasn't terribly complex, but had tons of replayability.
I would bet on the Harry Potter game being a relative flop. The Japanese market will probably be dead and that accounted for a huge proportion of Pokémon Go’s revenue. I would also doubt that many “whales” would be immediately attracted to the premise. They will have a tough time not just being Pokémon go but with Harry Potter this time, and I bet that will hurt mainstream adoption.
>There is also hope that Niantic’s pending game with a Harry Potter theme will also be popular when it comes out some time next year.<p>It will be interesting to see how successful this is, given that unlike Pokemon, Harry Potter isn't really a franchise defined by the location-based hunt-and-collect mechanic that drives Pokemon Go and Ingress.
Between Ingress, Pokémon Go and now Harry Potter, aren't they worried about fragmenting the landscape? There's only so much time an individual can spend on AR games; looking at how people moved between Ingress and Pokémon Go, I'd guess the limit is <i>one</i> popular game on the market, max two. Releasing more sounds like a way to selfpwn the entire business.
This feels a bit like Rovio for me - Pogo was very very popular but they look in every way like the classic one and done. They haven’t put very many good mechanics into any game yet