Like seemingly everyone near my age and many people below and above it, I’ve been playing Pokemon Go. It’s fun, and the nostalgia is palpable. It isn’t particularly well-done, however, the most innovative products perhaps necessarily rushed, and so, my criticisms:

• I hate having to give access to my full Google account to some shady subdivision without the public oversight and reputation of Google proper;
• It makes me sad to throw out Pokemon I trained since the beginning or caught in meaningful locations for much more powerful and otherwise identical Pokemon I find on my commute;
• It destroys battery (but to be fair, the GameBoy was pretty awful at that too).

The news of Pokemon Go made it to Wall Street, and Pavel Alpeyev and Yuji Nakamura (via John Gruber) report for Bloomberg that they like what they see:

The company has added more than $7 billion in market value since last week’s debut of a new smartphone app for its Pokemon fantasy monster character franchise. The game, which lets users track down virtual monsters in their vicinity, has topped the free-to-download app charts for Apple in the U.S. and Australia since its release on July 7, according to market researcher App Annie.

Nintendo’s shares responded with their biggest intraday jump since at least 1983, when the stock started trading in Tokyo, climbing as much as 25 percent on Monday. Investors are taking Pokemon’s early success as a sign of things to come for a company that has yet to commit the most popular characters from its Mario or Zelda franchises to mobile gaming apps.

The lesson I see here is not necessarily that this is a tipping point for AR/VR but rather that it’s still exceedingly good business to be in intellectual property. Consider that Niantec released an AR app before this that was met with a whimper, but when some IP from 1999 is added, a whole generation loses their collective mind and goes outside. The success of Pokemon Go is a powerful reminder of why companies like Marvel, Games Workshop, and Nintendo defend their IP so fervently: it can add $7 billion to your market value even 10 years after its inception.

I also caught an Electabuzz I’m quite proud of, and have a viciously high-level Pinsir.