Pokemon Go sets Apple App Store record for launch downloads, but US growth slowing

Posted:
in iPhone edited July 2016
The extraordinarily popular Pok?mon Go has broken the previous record for downloads in the first week after launch, as "peak Pok?mon" hit one week after U.S launch.




Apple confirmed the victory by developer Niantic's Pok?mon Go to Jim Dalrymple at The Loop. Since its U.S. launch, the title has remained atop the Top Free and Top Grossing charts with no interruptions.

Additionally, Pok?mon Go appears to be the biggest mobile game launch in U.S. history, beating Candy Crush Saga's performance in 2013. Analytics firm Survey Monkey found that the title attracted over 26 million daily active users in the U.S. as of July 15, which was more than the peak audience of 20 million for Candy Crush Saga.

Survey Monkey also believes that the U.S. Pok?mon Go peak has been reached, with daily average users sitting at approximately 22 million as of July 20, still more than Candy Crush Saga's peak traffic. The title launched early Friday in Japan, more than likely making up for the loss in U.S. regular daily users.




Nintendo, Google spin-off Niantic, Google, and The Pok?mon Company are the four companies involved in bringing the immensely successful Pok?mon Go to market. The Pok?mon Company maintains the Pok?mon intellectual property trademarks, and Google itself handles the mapping data.

Apple could reap an extra $3 billion in revenue in the next 12 to 24 months solely from in-app purchase revenue from the title, according to analysts. Nintendo itself is not altering its financial estimates for the quarter, saying that the impact will be felt more by The Pok?mon Company -- which Nintendo holds a one-third share of.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 15
    This game will have legs. They'll add new features in subsequent updates every few months which will draw people back into the game: player vs player Pokemon battles, trading with other players (especially in other countries where there are Pokemon not available in your area), adding in new batches of Pokemon (there are over 700 Pokemon and only 142 in this game), sponsorship deals with major companies that will let you collect new Pokemon and so on.
    caliDeelronpscooter63
  • Reply 2 of 15
    maestro64maestro64 Posts: 5,043member

    Does not surprise me it is slowing down. Asked my daughter if she still playing, she said her and her friends are done with it, they moved on. They been at non-stop since it came out, it got to the point they were carrying extra battery packs around to keep their phones running and they were driving all over the place to hunt.

    Grant it I figure it would last longer, but they got tired of it pretty quickly.

    Grimzahndysamoria
  • Reply 3 of 15
    I got to level 22 on July 14th and then quit.

    I assume that I am not alone.
    Grimzahn
  • Reply 4 of 15
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,309moderator
    Apple could reap an extra $3 billion in revenue in the next 12 to 24 months solely from in-app purchase revenue from the title, according to analysts. Nintendo itself is not altering its financial estimates for the quarter, saying that the impact will be felt more by The Pok?mon Company -- which Nintendo holds a one-third share of.
    The following article expands on some of the revenue estimates:

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/21/apple-to-make-3bn-in-revenue-from-pokemon-go

    They are basing $10 billion revenue ($3b to Apple) on the following:

    "Martin said Pokémon Go’s ratio of paid users to total users was 10 times that of Candy Crush, the hit game from King Digital that generated more than $1bn of revenue in both 2013 and 2014."

    One of the other Pokemon articles said it had 10x more users than Candy Crush but it's a 10x higher ratio of paid users to the total than Candy Crush. Candy Crush only monetized 2.3% of players.

    However, Pokemon still only has 30 million users total. If 23% are paying, they'd each need to spend over $1400 to generate $10b. Or they scale the audience up to 10x the size and have the paying users spend $140 each. If it made this kind of money, it would be the 4th highest grossing game in history:

    http://www.businessinsider.com/the-11-top-grossing-video-games-of-all-time-2015-8

    Sounds more like analysts were trying to drive Nintendo stock up so they could short the stock:

    http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/22/nintendos-stock-sees-massive-jump-in-short-interest-despite-pokemon-go-craze.html

    The stock price more than doubled in 2 weeks ($18b increase). There are numbers for how many players have bought the older Pokemon games here:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games

    That's around 25 million copies max per title. The same ~25 million Pokemon fans will be into this smartphone title. It'll be clearer over the next few weeks if they can grow the audience having access to the much larger (>2 billion) smartphone market. I reckon they'll need to bring multiple games to hit their target of 100 million unique players on smartphones. If they bring 10 major titles to smartphones in 2 years and hit an audience of 100 million, monetize 25 million at $10 per title, that's $2.5 billion revenue with Apple making $750m. $10b from a single free-to-play title seems pretty far-fetched.
    Deelronbaconstangbancho
  • Reply 5 of 15
    sflocalsflocal Posts: 6,092member
    I tried it out of curiosity.  The game worked well for the past few days, but the past two days the game just locks up when a pokemon is captured.  Not sure if an update was applied while I was offline, but the game was just too unstable on my iP6+.  Nice try but I pretty much left it.  I suspect many folks are in the same position.


    Grimzahn
  • Reply 6 of 15
    calicali Posts: 3,494member
    I feel so sorry for NEW Pokemon players. This game SUCKS compared to the "real" versions.

    Until there's an actual REASON to catch Pokemon like in the Nintendo games, Pokemon Go will continue to lose players.

    To those who have never played a real Pokemon PLEASE know it's a LOT better than this pointless crap.

    I hope an update fixes this.
  • Reply 7 of 15
    3 billion dollars? People, it's just a game! You are spending real money on things that don't really exist. Go get drunk, eat a load of pizza, go bungee jumping, things that are real. Or, give me your money and I'll dance around wearing a Pokemon suit in front of you wherever you go. I'll even let you catch me. 
    edited July 2016
  • Reply 8 of 15
    joshajosha Posts: 901member
    3 billion dollars? People, it's just a game! You are spending real money on things that don't really exist. Go get drunk, eat a load of pizza, go bungee jumping, things that are real. Or, give me your money and I'll dance around wearing a Pokemon suit in front of you wherever you go. I'll even let you catch me. 
    I didn't realize that so many "adults" had so little inside their heads.  :'(
    Oh well I can't complain, they will surely help my Apple stock value.  :)
  • Reply 9 of 15
    jbdragonjbdragon Posts: 2,305member
    I installed this game to see what all the fuss was about and I still don't get it.  I haven't loaded it up since.  There's far better, more fun games then this garbage.  Is it a age thing? I'm more into tower defense type games in my iPhone and iPad.
  • Reply 10 of 15
    why-why- Posts: 305member
    of course the growth is slowing. pretty much everyone that can get it already has
    dysamoria
  • Reply 11 of 15
    dysamoriadysamoria Posts: 3,430member
    why- said:
    of course the growth is slowing. pretty much everyone that can get it already has
    Yup. And it's a fad. Fads and growth are things that should never be expected to last forever. Unless cancer becomes a fad. Cancer is kinda immortal. I'm sure the stock market would love to monetize a fad for perpetual cancer growth. But then, it'd still be a fad and people would eventually grow disinterested in it, and the market pundits would still act like it was valuable info to promote when the latest fad slowed its growth... Sigh. I hate the stock market. And pundits. I hate them more than I hate fads.
  • Reply 12 of 15
    why-why- Posts: 305member
    dysamoria said:
    why- said:
    of course the growth is slowing. pretty much everyone that can get it already has
    Yup. And it's a fad. Fads and growth are things that should never be expected to last forever. Unless cancer becomes a fad. Cancer is kinda immortal. I'm sure the stock market would love to monetize a fad for perpetual cancer growth. But then, it'd still be a fad and people would eventually grow disinterested in it, and the market pundits would still act like it was valuable info to promote when the latest fad slowed its growth... Sigh. I hate the stock market. And pundits. I hate them more than I hate fads.

    what the hell are you talking about
  • Reply 13 of 15
    MacProMacPro Posts: 19,718member
    The guys obliviously walking off cliffs in CA playing with this game kind of sums it up for me.  The users are clearly lemmings.
  • Reply 14 of 15
    bobroobobroo Posts: 96member
    The news story should be how fast this game debuted and then became wildly popular--all over the country in a matter of a couple weeks.

    That's the compelling story of Pokemon Go.


  • Reply 15 of 15
    gatorguygatorguy Posts: 24,176member
    So as of today it looks like Pokemon Go has been downloaded at least 50 million times from Google Play. Geesh! Until the last few days it was a very limited release, primarily US, so that's a crazy number considering just 20 days since it was released. 
    edited July 2016
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