Pokémon Go Brings Augmented Reality to a Mass Audience - The New York Times

Also see Amazon's CTO just ripped whoever's behind the 'Pokémon Go' problems (Business Insider) and A Beginner's Guide to Pokemon GO (Bloomberg)

"Pokémon Go, though, is actually the work of a start-up, Niantic Inc., which was created inside Google and spun out of the company last year. Niantic’s first game, a science-fiction conspiracy thriller called Ingress, was made possible by Google’s digital mapping service. About 15 million users have downloaded Ingress, and there are a little over one million active players a month, said John Hanke, Niantic’s chief executive.

Niantic partnered with the Pokémon Company to make Pokémon Go. Mr. Hanke said he didn’t have exact numbers of Pokémon Go players, but that it was safe to say it will be “quite a bit beyond” the number of players Ingress has attracted. Downloads of Pokémon Go have been so frequent that Niantic’s servers had trouble handling the traffic and the company is struggling to add additional capacity. Mr. Hanke said Niantic was delaying the game’s introduction in additional countries for a few days so it could handle the demand."

Pokémon Go Brings Augmented Reality to a Mass Audience - The New York Times