Might explain why you aren’t seeing crowds
For nearly a year, people have been wondering how Pokemon Go is faring. We hear that it still makes millions in revenue, we see less people playing it, but we don’t really have hard data to go off of in many cases.
Well, data firm ComScore just provided a report that shows the total peak and fall of Go‘s userbase, and it’s basically the downward trend we all expected. When the game was a worldwide phenomenon, it grew rapidly into 28.5 million daily unique users. But before long folks started to realize that the game lacked basic features like trading and on the spot battling, and were alienated by the power users who dominated gyms. It slowly shrunk from there until plateauing at roughly five million at the end of 2016.
ComScore doesn’t have data on how the Generation 2 update fared recently, but anecdotally I didn’t see a major increase in players in my area. Maybe your situation is different, but it’s clear that Niantic didn’t rise to meet the demand of its userbase fast enough — I mean it’s nearly a year and we still don’t have many of the basic features advertised in the initial trailer.
Still, five million! They’re doing something right.
Cross-Platform Future Focus [ComScore via Recode]
