GPS-based augmented reality game Pokémon Go is all the rage right now.
The game has struck a chord both with every 90s kid who grew up on Pikachu and the other Pokémons and is quite familiar with Nintendo’s franchise (even though the game is built by another company, Niantic Labs) as well as the really young (kids from the 2000s) who find it adventurous and interesting.
Pokémania is back but not everyone is interested
In a span of a few days, Pokémon Go has generated so much interest that the value of Nintendo has gone through the roof while the games’ servers can’t seem to handle the insane traffic anymore. The game, is afterall, seeing more daily engagement from users than Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Messenger and WhatsApp according to SimilarWeb. People are spending an average of 43 minutes daily on the app or in other words all the time it takes for the powerful combo of the app itself, the camera and GPS to drain every damn smartphone’s battery when really stretched.
Users, on the other hand, have gone from having museums pleading with them to not go looking for Pokémons there to discovering dead bodies while in the process of catching Pokémons to being robbed while at it. It has even gotten others to get outside and exercise while chasing Pokémons (according to some, Pokémon Go has gotten more people to exercise in 24 hours than US First Lady Michelle Obama has managed to do in her 8 years of campaigning for the same using her influential White House pedestal). Some people have been fired over Pokémon.
Some players have even resorted to using drones to game the system. Simply put, the reception has been wild.
And the game is not even officially available in most places yet it is being played all over the world from the epicentre of tech in the Silicon Valley to the battlefields in Iraq.
All the hype, news and stuff about Pokémon Go can be tiring. More so for people who either have no interest in the game or don’t want to hear one more mention of it. As always, there’s a Chrome extension for that.
PokeGone is a Chrome extension that promises to deliver a Pokémon Go-less internet experience to anyone who gets it off the Chrome Web Store.
‘This extension will stop your eyes from seeing grown adults raving on about Pokemon’
Just like there is a way to get rid of Game of Thrones spoilers and mentions of the Donald, Pokémon Go is sorted too. At least for Chrome users.
