Earlier this week, Denver Nuggets star Jamal Murray was hanging out at an outdoor basketball court in East Oakland, patiently waiting for anyone to challenge him to a pickup game.
A virtual pickup game, that is. Murray is one of nearly 80 professional basketball players who are part of NBA All-World, a new mobile game from Niantic, the makers of Pokémon Go. Fans of that game have been scouring the world for close to seven years to collect digital Pokémon in the wild. Now, Niantic hopes that NBA stars like Murray, Steph Curry, and LeBron James can get basketball fans to get off the couch as well—and once and for all prove that Pokémon Go was not a one-hit wonder.
NBA All-World takes some elements of traditional sports games and combines them with the real-world exploration of Pokémon Go: People can recruit individual NBA players for their personal team, deck them out in gear from such brands as Adidas and Puma, and hone their skills with pickup games against other players.
However, much of this requires players to leave the comfort of their own home and venture to basketball courts, corner stores, and other landmarks in their neighborhood and beyond. “No other basketball game forces you to get outside, get off your butt,” says Andrew Macintosh, who leads product marketing for the game at Niantic.
“This is totally different,” agrees Matt Holt, who heads the NBA’s merchandising partnerships. And if it works, he suggests, NBA All-World could mark the beginning of a whole new genre of sports games.
NBA All-World makes use of the same mapping technology that also powers Pokémon Go and other Niantic titles. The company added more than 100,000 basketball courts worldwide to the map, and also indexed many more retail locations, where players can collect digital energy drinks and other items to power up and deck out their teams. “If you go to the mall, you can get some really cool clothes [for your players] while you’re there,” says Macintosh. “We’re trying to tie the digital world to the physical more than ever.”
Combining mobile game play with real-world exploration is a recipe that hasn’t always worked. Niantic had some early success with the location-based sci-fi game called Ingress, which still has a dedicated following close to a decade after its launch, and then struck global, viral pop-culture gold with 2016’s Pokémon Go. That game was downloaded more than 630 million times and generated $5 billion in revenue during its first five years, according to app analytics company Sensor Tower.
But when Niantic released a Harry Potter-themed mobile game in partnership with WB Games in 2019, the title flopped, leading to its cancellation two years later. Niantic also shut down an adaptation of the fantasy board game Catan in 2021, and pulled the plug on four unreleased titles amid layoffs at the company last year.
Critics at the time remarked that the Harry Potter game felt too much like a Pokémon Go clone, with some augmented reality (AR) eye candy to gloss over a lackluster story line. Niantic apparently learned from that experience: NBA All-World doesn’t use any AR effects at launch at all, and instead resorts to more traditional mobile gameplay. The title also features a star-studded hip-hop soundtrack, and uses many of the same mini games that people play on real courts.
Early numbers suggest that NBA All-World is not racing down the court toward a slam dunk. Based on preliminary data, Sensor Tower estimates that the game has been downloaded around 128,000 times during the first two days after its launch. Wizards Unite, the Harry Potter game, saw 2.7 million downloads during the same time frame.
Despite the slow start, there are also some signs that NBA All-World may ultimately fare better than the failed Harry Potter Game: Wizards Unite’s review average on Google’s Play Store was 3.7; All-World had an average of 4.2 at the time of writing, just shy of Pokémon Go’s 4.3.
Pokémon Go did surpass 10 million downloads within its first week, straining Niantic’s servers and forcing the company to delay releases in additional markets. Niantic’s Macintosh acknowledges that it’s hard for any new game to measure up to those metrics. “You can never bet on a viral hit,” he says. “The important thing with Niantic games is that we’re building them over a long period of time. We’re not expecting anything overnight, not expecting everything in a month or sometimes even a year.”
In other words: Niantic and the NBA are playing the long game—but as the NBA’s Holt fully acknowledges, success is never guaranteed. “That’s the nature of the gaming biz,” he says. “Not everything works.”
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