In the midst of announcing the launch of Pokemon GO for the Apple Watch during this morning’s iPhone 7 reveal, Niantic CEO John Hanke also dropped a neat statistic: Pokemon GO has been downloaded more than 500 million times.
The figure was also coupled by another cool statistic: since the game’s launch, Pokemon GO trainers have walked more than 4.6 billion kilometers, a figure which will undoubtedly soar when people are able to play the game on their smart watches.
This was all revealed during an announcement for Pokemon GO on Apple Watch. It’s worth noting that you won’t be able to catch Pokemon with your Apple Watch, however — you’ll still have to pull out your phone to toss your Pokeballs.
You’ll still get some haptic feedback whenever you come near a Pokestop, however, with a simple swipe of the watch allowing you to pick up items. You’ll also have to use your phone if you want to interact with gyms.
Comments
8 responses to “Pokemon GO Has Been Downloaded Over 500 Million Times”
So exactly like Ingress on Android Wear.
Wonder how far the active daily users numbers have slumped though. Didn’t take long to go through the majority of the content and from a game design point of view Pokemon Go is pretty damn horrible.
I’m still keeping an ear open for news on the game and waiting for an update that’s sizable enough to warrant playing again. Even if they released Gen 2 tomorrow though I doubt I could be bothered wandering around catching them all again. The mechanic just isn’t fun.
Didn’t they release the player numbers a few weeks back when they showed a number of other statistics?
Showed a huge drop in players, but hardly slowed the game down in terms of players and income.
From what I have seen in my area, there has been a decline, but the church I go to that has 4 Pokestops, is still packed out every evening and night.
The park I sometimes visit on the weekends, still has thousands of Pokemon players walking around.
For me though, I enjoy going out and walking, Pokemon only adds an extra layer.
(As a standalone, no, it isn’t what I would call a fun game either)
The last lot of statistic I saw would be a few weeks old so likely the same that you saw. That wasn’t released by Niantic though, it was tracked through other means and was only limited to US data.
I’m in South Australia and we only have one decent hotspot in the state at Semaphore beach. Everywhere else is pretty much pointless to go if you’ve got the general common spawn pokemon.
I’ve been to Semaphore once (wife wanted to go there) and checked it out but it’s too far and requires to much effort to go back regularly. If they’d balanced spawns so it was a bit more even then I’d bother to finish filling out my Pokedex.
Yeah I’m curious how the placement works too.
For example my GF’s suburb is pretty old, tons of heritage buildings and historic markers, but bugger all pokestops and gyms.
Meanwhile my area is the same, but the placement is freakish.
I’m wondering if the huge renovations of the town centre a few years ago, provided an updated map? I only assume because during the renovations the council went nuts on pop-up art installations and even though they are gone, their Pokestops still appeared.
I have also noticed that some smart businesses must have known and applied to Niantic. A local burger restaurant has a small mural hidden on a back wall, Mario breaking a block with a burger coming out.
That stop was present from day one and is clearly new compared to other murals there.
(Most people I show a screen shot to are shocked at the number of Pokestops, especially since my area isn’t really known for anything positive)
If I were you, I would head out on the weekend looking for any sculpture, art installation, plaque, mural and Heritage building.
If they don’t have a Pokestop, take a photo, research the deets and submit it to Niantic.
(But I would also enjoy that to some level, at least until I’m denied lol)
At launch all of the Pokestop/Gym/spawn locations were pulled from the database Niantic uses for Ingress. The Pokestops/Gyms were based on user submitted locations for Ingress, no idea when the last time they allowed submissions was. They opened it for a short time with Pokemon Go but I believe it’s closed again now, no idea if any new locations have shown up from that.
As for the spawn locations it was based on the “XM” resource for Ingress which used mobile usage data from 2010/2011. That’s why a lot of newer areas have less spawns and also Pokestops.
The amount of stops/gyms in an area is also heavily influenced by how many Ingress players were active there.
I still see loads of adults, couples, and groups of friends along wynnum road near my house every night. I can only extrapolate from that, that there must be a tonne of people, children and adults alike, playing that I don’t see or interact with.
Just because the game has gone quiet in our social circles doesn’t mean its not still pulling in a very large number of people.
And apparently it’s yet to launch in India…
Taking the two stats listed in the article, the average Pokemon Go player has only walked 9.2 km. That’s not a lot when potentially spread out over 2 months of play.
You can use the 4.6 billion km figure to make some guesses though. Lets say that a daily user might walk 1 km a day with the game, or 60 km from the start of the game. Then there could be at most ~ 76.7 million players fitting that profile based on the pigeon hole principle. The actual figure is likely to be a lot lower, since you’ll have a large number of people who’ve walked a shorter distance, and a smaller number who’ve walked a lot further.
If you make a guess on what the distribution of walking distances is, you can probably get a better estimate of what you’d consider active users.