Pokemon GO has officially surpassed the $2 billion mark for worldwide in-app purchase revenue, and it did it faster than legendary casual moneymakers Clash Royale and Candy Crush Saga. To be specific, it happened 811 days after the game’s release back in 2016. Clash Royale took 887 days, while the fastest game on Apptopia’s chart, Clash of Clans, took 768 days. As seen in the charts below, the game’s popularity internationally is significant, but Pokemon franchise homeland Japan and cultural melting pot the United States take the crown in both revenue and downloads over the lifetime of the game thus far. It’s worth noting that a smattering of world regions classed together under “other” did manage to beat out the United States and Japan, but did not beat the two put together, nor did it outclass all of the other, larger territories on the chart smashed together in revenue, though it did top them in downloads.
If you’re an app developer looking to make a game that’s meant to be played online by large international audiences, the key takeaways with this data set should be pretty obvious. For starters, the gulf between Japan’s revenue and download numbers is significant, making it a very appealing market for international games. The United States has no such gulf, which means that players are less likely to shell out, but it can be a profitable place to build popularity. Smaller countries, meanwhile, generally show diminishing returns in terms of revenue, likely due in no small part to economies that are not quite as grand as those seen in larger countries.
From an actionable stance, this means that the United States and Japan are where you can turn to for a very significant portion of your profits, but in the same breath, you should not write off the many smaller countries and territories out there. Releasing internationally takes time and resources, and it seems that prioritization is the name of the game; target larger, more profitable markets first, and use the revenue from them to release to other territories. Once you’ve achieved global saturation, however, you have to keep players engaged; Pokemon GO languished for a while, mainly in 2017, but came back strong with a number of new features and in-game events this year, bringing it on the upswing it needed to finally pierce that vaunted $2B barrier. Mobile gaming is a fickle market, but players tend to be loyal to games that are good to them. That is to say, players generally like games that don’t force them to spend in order to progress, and make them feel like they got their money’s worth when or if they do decide to spend.
