Everyone knows that Pokemon GO is popular. And everyone knows that Pokemon GO makes money. But analytics firm Sensor Tower has now published new data showcasing precisely how much money makes. Surprise: bucketloads.
According to Sensor Tower, Pokemon GO has put more than $210,889,825 million ($US160 million) for Niantic since the day it was released. It’s still got a few days to go before hitting the 30 day mark as well, and the game still hasn’t been released in plenty of countries.
It’d be fascinating to get a country-by-country breakdown of those figures, just to see how much Pokemon GO raised in that first day or two when Australians were making up the bulk of users. Those aren’t available, sadly.
The closest we have is some charts from App Annie about the time-aligned daily revenue for all games on iOS and Android without the Pokemon factor. Pokemon actually resulted in Australians spending slightly more money the first few days after it was out, but that quickly declined to regular levels.
Of course, that could be about to change significantly. Niantic’s latest updates have been deeply unpopular, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see commuters start to abandon the game in droves. It might make it easier to manage for the developers, but I doubt that’ll be appreciated by the hordes of trainers out there.
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18 responses to “Pokemon GO Has Made Niantic More Than $210 Million In A Month”
Oh look another puzzle piece. That explains so much about why they made pokemon harder to catch. To sell more pokeballs.
They aren’t that much harder to catch though, feels more like a balancing change to me. Now I have to dig into my great/ultra balls more if there’s one I really want rather than just stockpiling those. You can’t buy great/ultra balls so there’s no extra cash for them there.
It also follows the other games where higher level pokemon need great/ultra balls to catch, pretty standard pokemon fare.
I’ve found them a little bit more difficult to catch, but I don’t see it as much of a money grab though. More like getting people to visit pokestops more often to get more balls.
If anything, I’m more annoyed at the removal of the ‘tracker’.
But the tracker never worked?
It did for the first week or so…just the 3 step pokemon were bugged as they’d usually already despawned. We still have that bug now but it can be any of them.
Just when they disabled it by making everything 3 steps is when pokevision started. Without pokevision people would have been complaining about the tracker back then. Now pokevision is gone people are complaining about the tracker which makes sense.
Need to have some indication of where to go to find pokemon or it’s just aimless wandering and I for one don’t have time for that. I’m going to install Ingress and use that as a better indicator…hell I might even start playing Ingress, apparently it’s better.
Ok so it worked for a week then didnt work. So it’s not a *major* loss at this point given it was being played for a while without it working and people still made do. But I do agree, there needs to be *some* sort of tracking ability.
Well it was being played fine without it because the majority of players were using pokevision or other trackers. Go has 80 million active users, Pokevision reported 50 million unique users with 11 million unique users per day. Very significant numbers there.
Now we’re all really left without a tracker for the first time since release. I know I’ve been playing a lot less, others on reddit have been saying the same.
I’m fine to wait until they fix it though, it’ll get up and running sooner or later. Started playing PokeMMO again in the meantime.
A bit of a misnomer there though saying that the ‘majority’ were though. Unless you can back that up with hard quantitative data proving otherwise? I have no doubt some were but until say, the very last day of it being used for instance my son and I had never tried it. Even then we found Pokevision spotty at best. It’s not that I don’t want Pokevision back, I think it’d be cool for it to be, I just don’t think it’s this giant piece of disaster that it’s hyperbolic-ally being spun out to be.
@weresmurf It’s not a misnomer to say majority, and I did back it up with numbers
50million on pokevision from an 80million user base for PoGo is a majority.
Personally I’m fine with pokevision and other scanning maps not working as the information was too detailed. That has to be replaced with a tracking system from Niantic though, which they’re working on. I’m just waiting till it’s in before I bother to go on hunts.
My bad, absolutely no idea how I missed that and my apologies 🙂 As I said, unless. So you’re absolutely right. But like I have said elsewhere I do agree some tracking method is necessary. I’d love to see them merge with the Pokevision guys and incorporate it, I think that would be the best result personally for this whole shamozzle.
@weresmurf As far as I can tell at the moment Niantic’s challenge is to re-implement the tracking in a way that doesn’t cause a heavy load on their servers and also isn’t vulnerable to hacking/cheating.
It’s a pretty hard thing to do as on some level your phone client has to be told where pokemon are so it can display information to you. Anything your client knows can be abused by hackers.
The current method hackers use for scanning is to have hundreds of accounts jumping around with gps spoofing, check what shows up as “nearby” and push that onto a map. They’re also able to show how long till something despawns which puzzles me as Niantic don’t need to send that info to the client, it can stay server side.
Anyway they’ve got their work cut out for them, backyard programmers on reddit keep saying they’ve “fixed” the tracker with 2hrs of coding but they never address how to solve dealing with server load and hackers.
The tracker did indeed work very early on (like xenoun mentioned). Then they kept releasing the game in more and more countries without throwing some serious money at the servers.
Pokeballs are useless to catch hard pokemon.
Question:
Has there been any ‘traditional’ reviews of Pokemon Go as yet? Not counting the store reviews of course.
I mean, a) it’s an MMO of sorts so I guess there’s possibly in-progress reviews b) with the way sites usually cover AAA games nowadays the review is the PR/advertising campaign (that’s to do with the readership, not the outlets themselves – I know I often treat the review as the ‘launch or climax’ of my continued interest in something, to say nothing of the good vibes I get when I buy it!) and c) can some games simply be un-reviewable?
I tried to find a full stop in that. I really did.
Man, I wish I had them Scrooge McDuck dollars…..
Speculation was starting capital in PokemonGo development was a rumored 20 million… so 900% income based on initial investment. OUCH!
But where’s the decline from all those refunds? :p
they should celebrate with a 50% sale in the store 😀