These kind of games are the future. You know why? Money.
Incredibly potent marketing tool. You can tweak the game, that way bringing the people to the very location of the store that is paying for ads. Radio, TV, Internet or non AR games can't match that.
You can even persuade people to buy stuff, by giving them in-game incentives to do so. Dark ages are upon us...
Zuckerberg must be kicking himself in the groin for not being the one to partner with Niantic. Instead, he paid billions for useless VR.
Indeed, even though most of the things brought by augmented reality are already existent on the plane of reality: we are already seeing pubs signs everywhere in real life, on our computers, televisions and every man-made activities that brings attention have commercial partnerships. I dont think mankind is going to be "lured" (
) much more efficiently, but it does open some innovative methods and new platforms!
In-game incentives to buy real life shit? That would be even more frown upon than pay2win stuff. Not saying they wont try.
Also VR and augmented reality are two parts of the same technology. Not to add VR is much more adapted to the video game industry, AR is tooled for more down to earth uses. Pokemon GO is just one of the few uses that a video game can make out of it.
I'm waiting for hologram technology to become a thing, and AR to become a tool of daily life, THAT will be something to see!
