Startups cash in on app’s ubiquity
Pika Speed service drives PokémonGo players to the game’s Bay Area hot spots
Pokémon Go player Cyrus Phan saw the headlines, stories of eager gamers falling off cliffs or getting into car accidents in pursuit of the digital creatures.
But when he searched for a Bay Area driving service for Pokémon Go players, nothing came up. So he decided to start Pika Speed, which promises to help players advance more quickly, avoid walking and be driven to hot spots by Phan and his partners. “The difference between us and Uber and Lyft drivers is that we know the game,” said Phan, 29, who is on level 23 of Pokémon Go and also runs a catering company.
Phan is just one of the budding entrepreneurs looking to latch onto the success of the popular augmented reality mobile game. Project Fixup, a dating startup in Chicago, is matching singles on “PokéDates.” A San Francisco man is offering to catch the digital characters for a price, and other players are writing unofficial guides, releasing maps to find Pokémon and selling game accounts with high levels.
“Enterprising people are helping players who have more money and less time to get ahead in the game. That’s one of the dynamics of multiplayer or online gaming that people take advantage of,” said Billy Pidgeon, an independent analyst who covers the games industry.
Created by San Francisco software development company Niantic, Pokémon Go has been downloaded more than 30 million times worldwide and has generated $35 million in revenue since its release this month, analytics firm Sensor Tower estimates. Clicking on an app on their smartphones, players walk around to different places to catch cartoon creatures called Pokémon by throwing a virtual ball at them. The Pokémon, which are then trained and used to battle one another, appear on their phones as if they are in the real world.
On a recent sunny day in downtown San Jose, Pika Speed customer Mike Garcia sat in the back seat of a white Kia Optima trying to stock up on Poké Balls before starting his hunt for a specific Pokémon.
For $300 and six hours, players are taken on a route in the Bay Area filled with Magikarp, a floppy, red-orange fish. Players need to catch more than 100 Magikarp to evolve them into the ferocious and rare sea dragon Gyarados, which can be used to battle other Pokémon.
“To be realistic, I’m kind of lazy,” said Garcia, 24, who was wearing a Poké Ball cap. “And the prices they were offering, I thought why not?”
Within one or two trips, the service guarantees that players will have a Gyarados. But this day, the game is glitchy — a downside to tying a service to a mobile app that has been plagued with more traffic than its servers can handle. Garcia rescheduled this trip for another day and wasn’t charged for the ride.
“All my life since Pokémon came out, I was all about it,” said Garcia, a retail manager. “I also watched Digimon and YuGi-Oh!, but Pokémon just stood out the most, and it’s a lot of fun.”
The Pokémon Go craze is already giving new life to startups like Project Fixup in Chicago. On Wednesday, the day it launched Poké- Dates, a total of 9,157 people signed up for the matchmaking service, and another 6,510 people signed up by Thursday afternoon. Before PokéDates, the startup usually had about five to 10 new people signing up a day.
People fill out a questionnaire and share their schedule, and the matchmaking service pairs up singles they think are compatible and schedules dates for them. The first PokéDate is free and after that, each is $20.
“The odds are, if you meet someone at the corner of a PokéStop, you definitely have Pokémon Go in common,” said Daniel Korenevsky, who manages the company’s day-to-day operations as Chief Fixup Officer. “It really is a fun first date, a good ice breaker and a way to keep the conversation going.”
But catching Pokémon can be a tedious task for some. San Francisco resident Sean Young, who also owns a denim company, placed an ad on Craigslist offering his service as a “Pokémon Go walker” for $20 an hour after his friend sent him photos of the swarms of people playing the game.
“I already walk a lot and run and will do whatever it takes to get you to the next level. ALL over the city, all day long. I have easy access to the entire city and beyond so you don’t have to,” the ad reads.
With people likely leery of handing over their phones or account information to a complete stranger, Young promises to give them a business card with his contact information, a personal item of his before beginning the walk and hourly updates and screenshots.
He compared the service to dog walking. “Picture a pack of 10 dogs. Picture that with cellphones, and that was kind of what the vision and joke kind of was,” he said.
No one has responded to his offer yet, Young said. But if they do, he’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.