- Niantic’s Peridot game has had a low number of downloads, raising concerns about the short-term success of augmented reality projects.
- Unlike Pokémon Go, which had millions of downloads, Peridot has had a lackluster debut.
- Negative reviews focus on inconsistent AR, battery drain, and a poor monetization strategy.
Niantic’s new game, Peridot, has a low number of downloads, which worries the creator of Pokémon Go and raises more doubts about the short-term success of projects related to augmented reality.
The performance of Peridot, released on May 9, contrasts with what happened a few years ago with Pokémon Go and hundreds of millions of completed downloads and active users.
The problem: the commercial potential of the metaverse doesn’t seem to be what was expected and Peridot’s lackluster debut proves it.
Peridot is a free-to-play pet simulation game for smartphones that aims to blend the digital and physical worlds into what the San Francisco, US-based company calls the “metaverse of the real world.”
After downloading the Peridot app, players must give their new digital pet a name.
Using the device’s camera lens, the game overlays the virtual pet with whatever real-world image the user is pointing at. It can be, for example, a garden or a room.
Once the environment is generated, the Dot (the mascot) can run following tennis balls, looking for sweets or interacting with other objects.
The pet grows and acquires new abilities.
Although the game would seem to be very cute and captivating, It has not given, so far, positive results.
Results of Peridot, the new Niantic game
A week after the launch, and in the midst of numerous negative reviews on the networks and in the application store, Peridot has only added 670 thousand downloads, according to Sensor Tower data published by Bloomberg.
Some of the reviews talk about inconsistent augmented reality and others complain about the battery consumption of the devices.
There is also talk of a bad game monetization strategy which has a rating of three on Google’s PlayStore.
The game was expected to be attractive for being a kind of combination between Pokémon Go and tamagotchi, since its function is to find, raise and take care of virtual pets. But the results are not encouraging.
According to data from StatistaIn 2022, revenue from Pokémon GO in-app purchases exceeded $645 million worldwide.
However, the most profitable year for the augmented reality game was 2020, when many gamers discovered the title during the pandemic.
Just one week after the launch of this app on July 19, it had already been downloaded more than ten million times around the world.
One of the attractions of Peridot is the “multiplayer” possibility, which consists of collaborating with other gamers to cross pets and, in this way, obtain new species of Dots.
Now read:
Pokémon sleep will finally arrive in the middle of this year
Pokémon Happy Meal is a hit among millennials
Like Black Mirror, this virtual reality app allows you to enter your memories in 3D
