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

The extraordinarily popular PokÃ©mon Go has broken the previous record for downloads in the first week after launch, as "peak PokÃ©mon" hit one week after U.S launch.

Apple confirmed the victory by developer Niantic's PokÃ©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, PokÃ©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. PokÃ©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 PokÃ©mon Company are the four companies involved in bringing the immensely successful PokÃ©mon Go to market. The PokÃ©mon Company maintains the PokÃ©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 PokÃ©mon Company — which Nintendo holds a one-third share of.

15 Comments

ericthehalfbee 4489 comments · 13 Years

About 8 years ago

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.

maestro64 5029 comments · 19 Years

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.

mcfrazieriv 71 comments · 10 Years

I got to level 22 on July 14th and then quit.

I assume that I am not alone.

Marvin 15336 comments · 18 Years

AppleInsider said:
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.

sflocal 6135 comments · 16 Years

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.