Pokemon GO is the latest craze in thirty countries over the world and in under a month has rapidly become a massive success for Nintendo. The game started out as a Google April Fools in 2014 but Nintendo took the idea and effectively ran with it. Now, a little under eighteen months later, Nintendo and Niantic, the developer behind the application, have a massive hit on their hands. How significant has Pokemon GO become since the July 6th release? The infographic at the bottom of this article demonstrates some key ways that the application has become very important. Some of these statistics make for surprising, even disturbing, reading.
Firstly, in under a month, Pokemon GO has become the fourth most used application for smartphone users and it sits behind three heavyweight entries in the list: Facebook, Google Search and Contacts. This shows how quickly the game has become one of the central hubs of our devices. Figures suggest that 60% of smartphone users in those countries with the game run the application daily and average daily use is over 43 minutes. This almost certainly means that some people use the game for a few minutes a day to capture a sneaky Pokemon GO monster on their way into work whereas other people spend considerable amounts of time playing the game. In America, one in six of Android smartphone users are said to have played the game inside one week of it being launched. As far as the number of installs on the game, 10.8% of Android users have the game installed, which compares with 3.6% of Android smartphone owners having the Netflix application installed. Furthermore, since the July 6th launch, APK mirror traffic for the Pokemon GO app is showing a near-600% rise. A slightly more disturbing trend is reported by Pornhub, which is that the website has seen a 136% rise in the number of Pokemon searches since the game was launched – Pornhub did not detail how many searches were performed before July 6th.
We have seen the stock market and Nintendo try to gauge how much of a financial success the Pokemon GO game has been and will be for the developers, and depending on the source of the data the numbers are very different however this infographic shows that players spend $3M million on the game daily and by early July 2017, this is forecast to have topped $1 billion over the year. The game generated $14 million in the first four days after launch. We will need to wait for Nintendo’s next quarterly update to determine how effective the game has been at generating money for the business.