Will the new Ghostbusters AR game replicate the success of Pokémon Go

Pokémon Go was one of the hottest smartphone games of 2016 – allowing players to travel and explore the real world on a quest to collect a range of cool Pokémon creatures via augmented reality.

Its success was largely due to the nostalgia from those who grew up watching and indeed playing Pokémon and made the game a huge hit.

For those of you unfamiliar with augmented reality (AR) here is a quick explanation of how it works.
AR takes a live view of a physical environment. It then augments that reality by adding or manipulating it with artificial inputs.  This overlaid information can alter the perception of the real world and adds an immersive aspect to the real environment with the individual can interact. you can see a fuller explanation at Wikipedia.

Following on from the huge success of the Pokémon AR game Sony Pictures Entertainment Consumer Products, Ghost corps and a South Korean based published called FourThirtyThree Inc have collaborated to bring us a new AR game that is inspired by the cult classic Ghostbusters franchise.

A short demo of this new game called Ghostbusters World has just been showcased at Google’s MWC booth and I think it should be a hit.

The game was used to demonstrate the new functionalist available from the release of Google’s ARCore AR platform.

The game is set to tap into the huge number of Ghostbusters fans. While they may not be as numerous as Pokémon followers the game looks set to be a good hit and will undoubtedly have much wider appeal than just the core Ghostbusters fans.

This game will take ghosts from the franchises classic films, TV show, and comic books, put them into the world of AR and let players hunt and capture them with their smartphone powered proton packs.

This gif showing the game looks fairly impressive but for more details, we will have to wait until next months Games Developers Conference.