What Happened to AR Gaming?

Remember Pokemon Go? The game that would let you track and capture Pokemon “in real life” with your smartphone? Pokemon Go sort of came and went, didn’t it? It was all everyone was talking about for a little while. People were making memes about it, it was being featured in sketch comedy shows, all those fake news sites were reporting people wandering into biker bars and off of cliffs while playing it, and now you barely hear about it at all.

And not only that, you barely hear about augmented-reality gaming at all.

So what happened? Did AR gaming just disappear for good? Did the shine wear off, or is it sort of like VR gaming, which never really took off in the 90’s, but seems to be coming back in force twenty years later now that the tech is starting to become more affordable?

After Pokemon Go, AR gaming didn’t have an immediate follow-up. There was no “Pong” to Go’s “Spacewar.” But, that doesn’t mean AR gaming is dead and buried, another flash in the pan like we see so often in tech. Rather, this may be more of a “calm before the storm” moment. There are some developments on the horizon that should excite fans of Pokemon Go.

In a recent interview, Pokemon Go developer Niantic muses on the possibility of designing AR games for Amazon’s in-ear Alexa system. Although designing for an audio-system may sound challenging, the imagination races at the possibility of, say, horror games, where you can hear the monster sneaking up on you.

One of the reasons we haven’t heard of many AR games is that Pokemon Go has been the only significant AR game with a major brand attached. That may be about to change, though, with the upcoming zombie-killin’ game, The Walking Dead: Our World set to become the Sonic the Hedgehog to Pokemon’s Mario.

Some argue that AR is likely to outperform VR in the long run, but… it takes a lot of faith from investors. We can see why virtual reality is exciting, but augmented reality is still a relatively new concept, and it’s going to take a few more years to get the tech where it needs to be.