Pokémon Go makers take on basketball with NBA All-World

polygon.com:

Basketball is getting the Pokémon Gotreatment in NBA All-World, Niantic’s next augmented reality mobile game. The developer, the league, and its players association jointly announced the new title is in development Tuesday morning.

NBA All-World will take gameplay loops familiar to Pokémon Go fans and apply them to basketball, as both a recreational sport and lifestyle. In the free-to-play game, players will be able to collect star NBA players, buff and customize them with items picked up from visits to real-world locations, and take on other players in one-on-one matches at their neighborhood courts and other locations.

“This is where the NBA’s gaming and lifestyle meets the real world metaverse,” Marcus Matthews, the game’s senior producer, told media in an online briefing Monday. “We’re enveloping the world around you into a basketball universe, or what I like to call turning the real world into a basketball theme park.”

Matthews, a veteran of Sega of America’s sports publishing and the very first NFL and NBA 2K games, joined Niantic in 2021 to oversee NBA World. Adrienne O’Keeffe, the NBA’s vice president for global partnerships, said the league and Niantic began discussing a collaboration about five years ago, shortly after Pokémon Go’s summer 2016 launch made it a mainstream, global phenomenon.

“They came to us about the same time we were thinking about them,” O’Keeffe said. “From our first meeting […] it was clear that we saw where this could go, and ever since then, we’ve been working on the game and getting ready for this moment.”

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Matthews said NBA All-World will touch most aspects of recreational basketball that he enjoyed growing up as a sports- and computing-obsessed kid in Jacksonville, Florida.