Pokemon Go launches in the UK, is now the biggest mobile game in US history
The Pok?mon Go deployment rolls on with the game appearing in the U.K. App Store overnight on Thursday, one day after the title went live in Germany.
As with Wednesday's rollout, the official Pok?mon Go Twitter account heralded the release in the U.K. The continued rollout across Europe affirms a report from Monday that indicated the blockbuster title would expand internationally this week.
As with the initial demand in every other launch country, outage tracking data aggregator Downdetector.com is noting wide areas of the U.K. suffering from server outages. Yesterday's launch country, Germany, is still seeing massive outages as well.
Pok?mon Go appears to be the biggest mobile game in U.S. history, supplanting a peak set by Candy Crush Saga in 2013. Analytics firm Survey Monkey found that Pok?mon Go attracted nearly 21 million daily active users in the U.S. as of Wednesday, which was more than the peak audience of 20 million for Candy Crush Saga.
Nintendo and Google spin-off Niantic are only two of the companies involved in bringing the immensely successful Pok?mon Go to market, with The Pok?mon Company largely responsible for intellectual property management, and Google itself handling the map data. Thursday's launch makes the U.K. the fifth country where the game is available, joining the U.S., Australia, Germany, and New Zealand.
While launches in Japan and other countries in Asia are sill rumored to be "within a few days," the Japanese website for Pok?mon Go remains unchanged after last week's modification, and only gives a vague 2016 window.
As with Wednesday's rollout, the official Pok?mon Go Twitter account heralded the release in the U.K. The continued rollout across Europe affirms a report from Monday that indicated the blockbuster title would expand internationally this week.
As with the initial demand in every other launch country, outage tracking data aggregator Downdetector.com is noting wide areas of the U.K. suffering from server outages. Yesterday's launch country, Germany, is still seeing massive outages as well.
Pok?mon Go appears to be the biggest mobile game in U.S. history, supplanting a peak set by Candy Crush Saga in 2013. Analytics firm Survey Monkey found that Pok?mon Go attracted nearly 21 million daily active users in the U.S. as of Wednesday, which was more than the peak audience of 20 million for Candy Crush Saga.
Nintendo and Google spin-off Niantic are only two of the companies involved in bringing the immensely successful Pok?mon Go to market, with The Pok?mon Company largely responsible for intellectual property management, and Google itself handling the map data. Thursday's launch makes the U.K. the fifth country where the game is available, joining the U.S., Australia, Germany, and New Zealand.
While launches in Japan and other countries in Asia are sill rumored to be "within a few days," the Japanese website for Pok?mon Go remains unchanged after last week's modification, and only gives a vague 2016 window.
Comments
Wish Apple would have acquired Nintendo long ago.
Yes it's ridiculous. Also the map should be in a corner while the rest of the screen is front camera+AR. Would solve a ton of problems and be more fun.
Im surprised Clash Royale is a top game. I play it a lot. Where the heck is Angry Birds in the chart?
I'll bet a Lure Module that Nintendo is STUNNED at the success and is busy loading up the boardrooms with pizza trying to figure out what a smartphone is still.
Instead of an alien invasion or a James Bond super-villain blowing up Tower Bridge like the movies told us, it will collapse under the weight of the Pokemon Go players gathered at the Gym in the middle of it.
Niantic is a independent company that spent over 3 years developing Ingress which is exactly what Pokémon Go is just with a Pokémon theme slapped on top. Apple couldn't come up with that amount of information in such a short period of time to make Pokémon Go work the way it does. It took 1000s of users imputing information for all the portals that took many years.
In addition, for this game to be as popular as it is, it has to be on both platforms for it to be as successful as it is. EVERYONE is playing this and coming together outside meeting up and finding new friends regardless of platform they play on. They don't care about all the Apple/Android crap you and a few others seem to care about so much. They just want to have fun and enjoy being together.
The servers got impacted because the game blew up so quickly beyond anyone thought it would. It's being fixed and will/is improving everyday. Apple seems to have cloud issues a lot as well. Not everyone is perfect, not even Apple.
Having said that, I do see this game as being something positive, because it will get rid of the dumbest millennials that we have.
There have already been numerous accidents and just plain stupidity caused by this game, with morons who have their faces buried in their phones. Players have already gotten hit by cars, robbed, walked into lakes, walked into traffic, discovered dead bodies and that's just for starters!
This game will get rid of the dumbest among us. So keep playing.
Mobiles devices are great, but many people have no mobile etiquette and some of them will soon have to pay dearly for their rudeness, selfishness and complete stupidity.
But you know me. I tend to focus on the negative side of things usually.
http://www.ea.com/news/tetris-game-surpasses-100-million-mobile-downloads
Candy Crush has hit 93 million daily users worldwide so Pokemon would fall short of that so far. There's always going to be articles about currently popular products, if sites started posting articles about Tetris when everybody is talking about Pokemon, nobody is going to read the stories. Maybe they could dress it up:
Scandal: Pokemon not as popular as everyone thinks. Game from the 80s still has it beat.
But then a whole bunch of commenters would point out that there's no way to verify how many copies of Tetris were used at the same time and the headline was just trying to get people to click on it, not realising every headline tries to do this.
The point to take home is just that Pokemon Go is really popular. It's already top of the App Store's free and highest grossing chart after a single week and reportedly making $1.6m per day in the US:
http://qz.com/729935/pokemon-go-is-making-1-6-million-each-day-in-the-us-from-ios-users-paying-for-silly-virtual-goods/
Pokemon was already a huge franchise before this game:
http://www.polygon.com/pokemon/2014/8/18/6030089/Pokemon-sales-numbers
"The Pokémon video game franchise has sold more than 260 million games worldwide
The Pokémon trading card game has shipped more than 21.5 billion cards to 74 countries in 10 languages"
There were over 150 million DS users and not all of them moved to a 3DS. Probably about 100 million Nintendo fans moved to smartphones and have been desperate to get games like this. For all the games that are on smartphones, the platform is still lacking in good quality games so any major games publisher can make a big impact. They just don't know how to make money consistently yet. Free-to-play works for some games but not all. When you look at big console titles, really successful titles sell in the low millions in the first week but because every game is about $60, the revenue is huge. GTA V made $1b in 3 days, >$3b overall. This really successful mobile title will have made ~$10m in a week because <5% of free-to-play users pay for things and they'll pay ~$10-20. If it had been $20 upfront like on a DS/3DS and had this sales volume, it would be ~$400m revenue but 20 million people won't pay $20 on mobile. Square Enix is trying this:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/final-fantasy-vi/id719401490?mt=8
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app-bundle/final-fantasy-iv-complete-pac/id918388546?mt=8
One strategy is to have subscriptions per company so you'd pay monthly to access a company's games library and lose access to the games when you stop paying. These Pokemon players would pay for example $0.99/month to use Pokemon Go and when Fire Emblems and Animal Crossing arrive, they get access to them. With 100 million users paying this, they'd make $840m per year recurring. That's still a fraction of the $4.5b Nintendo made last year but half is hardware revenue that isn't very profitable and additional IAPs can increase it, maybe they'd set the price at $1.99/month.
The other problem is how to attract the audience on mobile because there's a different way of interacting than consoles. Augmented reality has been an attraction here but only because it matches up so well with a game about collecting items. Nintendo probably couldn't apply this to any of their other games e.g rescue Princess Peach from the local supermarket.
It looks like people just want a DS console experience but without Nintendo's hardware and use the phone they already have. This will need a hardware add-on to be able to cover their full library of titles. Nintendo has given the impression they want to use smartphones to connect with players and not replace their own hardware. Having a few tens of millions of accounts gives them direct marketing for their products like the NX hardware next year and phones will just supplement this. Nintendo can't really do connected hardware everywhere as people won't get a cellular data contract for their Nintendo hardware so phones have to take that place.
"Biggest mobile game in US history"
"Smartphone game with most active daily users ever"
Both effective, and one of them a lot more accurate.