Believe it or not, it’s been almost three months since Pokemon GO initially started rolling out and taking over the world. Everyone and their mothers were soon catching virtual pocket monsters as long as their phone batteries allowed them to and the augmented reality (AR) mobile game was making headlines all over the globe, for both good and bad reasons. Today, the hype has understandably died down a little bit but that isn’t to say the game still isn’t making millions on a daily basis. All in all, Nintendo, The Pokemon Company, and Niantic Labs are all rather happy with what they’ve managed to achieve with Pokemon GO and are already looking towards the future.
Of course, that isn’t to say the people behind this mobile gaming phenomenon aren’t happy to reminisce about the past, even when the past involves a lot of server crashes, hacking attacks, and pleading to Google for help. In fact, it’s precisely Google who just revealed another interesting tidbit about Pokemon GO. As stated by the Mountain View tech giant, Pokemon GO was the first app ever that utilized the company’s new hosting feature that shared responsibility for server stability between Google and Niantic Labs. The original plan was to set an expected traffic estimation and the “worst case scenario” prediction prior to launching the game, then act appropriately once people start playing it, in accordance to how far off the first estimation was. As it turns out, it was very, very off.
You can see the details in the graph below but to summarize: Niantic expected 50 times less traffic than what it achieved and even the studio’s “worst case scenario” was about five times better than what actually happened. Sounds crazy? How about the fact that the Niantic’s estimates were broken within 15 minutes of Pokemon GO rolling out in Australia and New Zealand? Yes, Pokemon GO started well, to put it mildly. In fact, probably the only thing that’s more incredible than these numbers is the fact that Google’s Luke Stone described the process of adding extra server capacity as “seamless” when it was everything but.