How can a game that’s not even launched in Singapore get everyone talking about it, fighting to get downloads of it before its official release and even someone fired in Singapore?
Pokemon GO, the augmented reality game which allows you to travel between the real world and the virtual world, this week broke all records with a reported 10 million+ downloads in the first week, exceeding Twitter in daily active users, and with higher average user time than Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram & WhatsApp – and from its demo video, you can tell it’s targeting a new generation of women gamers.
Released last week in Australia, New Zealand and the US, it’s got gamers all over the world fired up to play it and I have to confess, even as a non-gamer, I am now so curious about it I have to try it. (Here’s a post if you want to understand what it is in less than 400 words).
In Singapore, an Australian expatriate was fired from his job at property portal 99.co after he ranted about not being able to download the game and vented abuse about Singapore.
His employer, Darius Cheung, founder and CEO of 99.c0, in a blog post, apologised for the behaviour and added that as a proud Singaporean company, 99.co does “not condone such language or behaviour”, and that it had since sacked him. His letter has been applauded in social media as a lesson in social media crisis management.
But before every game developer wonders how this overnight sensation came about, here’s a sobering truth – it took Pokemon GO’s creator John Hanke 20 years to come to this moment.
In this post in Entrepreneur Inspiration, Roger James Hamilton went into detail the many steps and years Hanke took before he got to Pokemon GO.
Detailing the steps and years, he said, “The overnight success of Pokémon Go has taken John Hanke 20 years to create.
“Throughout these 20 years, while he had a big vision of a game layer over the world, he didn’t know what form it would take. At every step, he just focused at his next level up.”
The advice, “At every step, he just focused at his next level up”, reminded me of a radio documentary on endurance athletes and how they prepare and make it through their extraordinary feats.
When Diana Nyad, who made the record-breaking unassisted swim in shark infested waters from Cuba to Florida at the age of 64, was asked what keeps her going in any endurance feat, she said she just focuses on the next step – she breaks up the race into parts and accomplishes it, part, after part.
It’s a useful tip for any entrepreneur or anyone who sets themselves a goal, particularly in today’s world where there’s so much happening, so fast, that it can be overwhelming that you can often get distracted and sometimes even lose sight of the original purpose of your journey – like searching for something on the web and suddenly, you’re down a rabbit warren going everywhere but ending nowhere.
And it’s good to be reminded that even in today’s world where most people are searching for instant fame and we think it’s possible, there is really no such thing – you could say Psy for example with his Gangnam Style video was an overnight sensation but was it? He had been performing for years before he hit gold.
So whether it’s Hanke’s 20 years or 10,000 hours – the amount of time Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Outliers” says it takes anyone to achieve mastery at what he or she does – remember, there’s really no such thing as an overnight sensation except if you are a cat or dog doing cute things on the Internet.
