Bringing Pokémon GO to life on Google Cloud
I really appreciate this blog post. It gives a great insight into what is going on behind the scenes. I was really surprised by how low their their worse case scenario was. Absolute worst case would be every single person capable of running the game playing. Obviously this wouldn&#x27;t happen, but for a brand with as much recognition as Pokemon, I think &quot;What if everyone in the world started using this&quot; is a good place to start. Obviously this won&#x27;t happen, but it&#x27;s important to think about why it won&#x27;t happen. &quot;What if everyone who has played Pokemon or wanted to know more about Pokemon downloaded this game?&quot; is still unlikely, but it&#x27;s less unlikely. It&#x27;s probably not far off from what actually happened.<p>I don&#x27;t want to criticize their model too much, because it&#x27;s obviously simplified for our benefit. However, it appears that their worst-case scenario was &quot;What if we become the next bejeweled or [insert popular F2P game here]?&quot; It&#x27;s a ridiculous assumption, because Pokemon has a much broader appeal than any other casual game, cause the IP is so insanely popular, and the game still appeals to people who just want a casual game. I know it is a lot easier to get fired for spending too much money than it is for not spending enough, but it&#x27;s a stretch to say their launch traffic was beyond imagination. Niantic should start looking for new analysts now if their current analysts honestly thought this traffic was outside the realm of possibility.<p>I don&#x27;t consider the server issues to be much of a problem though. It&#x27;s hard to ensure everything will work perfectly under that kind of load. You have to accurately predict who will be playing, how much they will be playing, how they will interact with the game, and so much more. However, I do think they need to figure out their communication with the fan base. I know that there will be a vocal portion of any constituency that hates everything. That isn&#x27;t a good excuse for communicating poorly. Good communication will help almost every relationship.