New York, New York - Niantic, the makers of Pokémon Go, have launched an NBA recreation of their hit augmented reality game for the basketball world with a new mobile game that lets you virtually meet and recruit pros from the league.

Gotta catch 'em all!

Like the wild Pokémon of Pokémon Go, the pro athletes featured in the new NBA All-World can be seen superimposed onto what your smartphone camera sees, and you can find them when you walk to certain spots in your neighborhood.

But unlike the Pokémon that you have to catch, these basketball pros need recruiting, and to get the stars onto your team, you need to beat them at a game of hoops.

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Once you have "acquired" the player, you can train them and use them in competitions.

Essentially gamers are once again seeing the same formula that made Pokémon Go a global phenomenon in 2016, if only briefly. The idea is to bring the world of the NBA back onto neighborhood streets, Niantic explains.

The developers have set up virtual basketball courts in neighborhoods around the world where players can compete their way up in leaderboards. For this purpose, more than 100,000 actually existing courts have also been built into the map.

Niantic has so far struggled to repeat the runaway success of Pokémon Go. A game with characters from the Harry Potter universe was discontinued, while games centered on the board game Catan and Transformers robots were halted before a wider launch.

Niantic is currently cooperating with Nintendo on a game with figures from the Pikmin series and is trying to establish its own digital creatures for the first time with Peridot.

NBA All-World is officially available for download, claiming it "unleashes the new era of hoops."