'Pokemon GO' Update: Did Niantic & Google Vastly Underestimate Game's Popularity? [VIDEO]
Niantic and company were not prepared at all for the incredible surge in popularity for Pokemon GO.
A new blog post from Google Cloud details what Niantic expected from the launch of Pokemon GO, compared to their worst case scenario estimate, compared to the actual results. As the blog post states, the proof is right there in the graph.
The Cloud Datastore transactions per second were a whopping 50 times greater than what Niantic and company had estimated.
"The teams targeted 1X player traffic, with a worst-case estimate of roughly 5X this target. Pokémon GO's popularity quickly surged player traffic to 50X the initial target, ten times the worst-case estimate," the blog states. "In response, Google CRE seamlessly provisioned extra capacity on behalf of Niantic to stay well ahead of their record-setting growth."
Of course, this huge surge in transactions and downloads caused Pokemon GO to be buggy and not work to its full potential.
"Not everything was smooth sailing at launch!" the post acknowledges. "When issues emerged around the game's stability, Niantic and Google engineers braved each problem in sequence, working quickly to create and deploy solutions. Google CRE worked hand-in-hand with Niantic to review every part of their architecture, tapping the expertise of core Google Cloud engineers and product managers - all against a backdrop of millions of new players pouring into the game."
At this point, Pokemon GO fever has certainly subsided in the pop cultural landscape, so there's less risk of bugginess; the app has fallen to no. 46 on the App Store charts in iTunes, as of Thursday afternoon.
Regardless, Google Cloud is proud to have been part of such a huge movement.
"Niantic's Pokémon GO was an all-hands-on-deck launch that required quick and highly informed decisions across more than a half-dozen teams," they write in the post. "The sheer scale and ambition of the game required Niantic to tap architectural and operational best-practices directly from the engineering teams who designed the underlying products. On behalf of the Google CRE team, I can say it was a rare pleasure to be part of such a memorable product launch that created joy for so many people around the world."
