It’s probably going to be a little while until Niantic finishes up the Pokémon GO global launch and manages to reveal any hard data about the game. But until then, estimates are already rolling in about just how much of a smash hit the mobile AR game really is.
Market intelligence firm Sensor Tower has told me that they estimate Pokémon GO already has at least 7.5M US downloads on iOS and Android (Google Play only) since early Thursday, with $1.6M in daily revenue in Apple’s iOS store alone, though those figures are bound to increase as new data continues to roll in.
Pokémon GO is a free-to-play game but employs microtransactions to bring in revenue. While none are mandatory and the best way to advance in the game is simply through walking, many of the boosts for egg-hatching, Pokémon luring, or double XP are incredibly helpful, and players have eagerly shelled out real life money for the “coins” needed to buy them.
It’s unclear what’s the top seller in the Poké-store, but I would guess Lures and Incense are very popular for those who don’t want to/can’t move around during the day, but I think the best value is probably buying multiple egg incubators so you can hatch more than one egg at a time (I have uh, nine).
Keep in mind, all of this is US only, and the revenue is only for the iOS store at this point. Once the other territories are factored in, and once the game is truly released worldwide, it’s hard to imagine just how big Pokémon GO will get. I’ve already seen it being called a fad that will probably soon burn out, and while I agree things may never reach the level of what we saw this opening week, even if it is a fad, it’s big enough where that shouldn’t matter. Pokémon GO will make Nintendo and Niantic an absolutely ungodly amount of money, and will probably shift some of Nintendo’s core priorities going forward.
Nintendo has been extremely hesitant to dive into mobile, given their own position in handheld hardware, and their first forays like Miitomo haven’t exactly taken the world by storm. But here, in the form of Pokémon GO, we have “concept + execution” success in a way that has become a full blown worldwide cultural phenomenon, and players are having so much fun they don’t think twice about throwing money at the game.
Obviously in the wake of Pokémon GO’s success, the game is likely to spawn a number of imitators that are chasing after this kind of revenue. But it’s easy to imagine that the crux of the reason this works at all is not because AR itself has suddenly become a thing, but because this is Pokémon we’re talking about here, and I’m not sure what other properties can achieve something like this without that franchise. But developers will sure try. Nintendo’s last “fad” blockbuster hit, the Wii, made Sony make the Move and Microsoft the Kinect. Who knows what will try to ride the coattails of GO’s success? But without Pokémon, and without Niantic’s years of Ingress data which serves as the skeleton for GO, it’s hard to imagine anything getting anywhere close.
Even as initial estimates, these numbers are extremely impressive, and will likely only continue to get more impressive as time goes on. For now, the craze only seems to be escalating, and with a full global launch still to come, this is only the beginning.
Update: Some updates via SuperData, who says Pokemon GO has brought in $14.04 million across all mobile platforms since launch when it became the highest grossing game on both iOS and Android. In contrast, Ingress, Niantic's last AR game on which Pokemon GO is built, only made $1.1M in its entire lifespan.
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