Apple says Pokémon Go is the most downloaded app in its first week ever

https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/22/apple-says-pokemon-go-is-the-most-downloaded-app-in-its-first-week-ever/

by doppp • 10 years ago

422 210 10 years ago

I'm confused by the title. Is PoGo the first app to reach x downloads in the first week of release, or is it the most downloaded app of all time, just one week after release? Slow internet won't let me view the article.

_asummers• 10 years ago

Of all apps that have been released, Pokemon Go has more downloads during the first week than any other app had during the first week.

puddintane• 10 years ago

"While the game was only available in a few countries at the time, the app has attracted more downloads in the App Store during its first week than any other app in App Store history."

awqrre• 10 years ago

That probably mean that hey had more downloads then any other app's first week but it could also mean more downloads then any other app since their initial release?

cag_ii• 10 years ago

Quote from the article: "... the app has attracted more downloads in the App Store during its first week than any other app in App Store history."

honkhonkpants• 10 years ago

That's still ambiguous.

jlarocco• 10 years ago

Agreed the headline is terrible and very confusing with the "ever" tacked on the end.

Something like "Apple says Pokemon Go is the most downloaded app ever, after just one week," would have been much more clear, IMO.

longsangstan• 10 years ago

which is the 2nd most downloaded app?

asdfologist• 10 years ago

Agreed that it's ambiguous. Better would have been "Pokemon Go achieved the all-time highest one-week downloads".

smaili• 10 years ago

Would love to know the app who previously held the record.

jandrese4• 10 years ago

I'd bet on something like the Facebook app, assuming they advertised it heavily when it first came out.

Jackim• 10 years ago

Facebook has been out for ages though, the number of total devices has grown significantly since then.

Thaxll• 10 years ago

It's probably another game.

vhost-• 10 years ago

Maybe flappy bird?

BryantD7• 10 years ago

Clash Royale would be my guess. Recent release, IP carries over from a very popular existing game, but it's not just a sequel. Also had great word of mouth from the geobeta.

boodm• 10 years ago

I have to speculate that Minecraft and Angry Birds have both individually had more downloads than Clash Royale.

cookiemonsta• 10 years ago

Is it actually a poparul game? I've never heard of it...

B1FF_PSUVM• 10 years ago

I'd bet a dime on Angry Birds.

jandrese4• 10 years ago

Shows you just how much pent up demand there was for Nintendo to release games on mobile.

Getting a huge first week download count is a lot easier when you have literally decades of brand recognition. Being a free download certainly didn't hurt either.

It remains to be seen what the customer retention numbers look like. I saw some absolutely insane projections earlier this week about how Apple and Nintendo were going to make billions off of Pokemon Go. I don't see how they're going to sustain the current game as it gets fairly grindy and there isn't much to do once you've caught them all. Maybe some compelling new features will be added to keep players from getting bored? Direct peer to peer battles and possibly trading for example.

mtrpcic• 10 years ago

Honestly, those compelling new features need to come soon. I've only caught maybe 50% of the catalog, and it's already getting really grindy. It's a LOT harder to pull users back onto the platform once they've left than it is to keep them enticed while they're already on. I predict something like a 70% dropoff rate for users over the next 30 days unless they release something shiny and new[0]

[0] Purely anecdotal, but based on multiple contacts already getting bored enough to uninstall

losteric2• 10 years ago

I've already stopped playing... I was at level 23 and with well over 50% caught, and I still had no chance of winning local gyms. It's not engaging unless I can compete, and I wasn't willing to heavily grind on a casual game just to fight random people.

I realized Pokemon Go was just a "background activity" for hanging out with friends... and I'd rather focus on the people.

I'll jump back in as soon as they added trading and player vs player.

ben_jones2• 10 years ago

Do non-tech demographics delete unused apps or just let them pile up on their phone? It seems to me the biggest barrier to entry is getting people to go to an app store and make the initial download, in which case getting them to come back wouldn't be all that hard with a well marketed upgrade assuming the app is still there.

kbenson• 10 years ago

It's a LOT harder to pull users back onto the platform once they've left than it is to keep them enticed while they're already on.

Then again, I imagine it's a lot easier to pull prior users back than it is to find new ones, so in that respect, they're already ahead of everyone.

serge2k2• 10 years ago

Maybe some compelling new features will be added to keep players from getting bored? Direct peer to peer battles and possibly trading for example.

You mean actually make it a pokemon game?

That's crazy talk.

(and I want to train up my team too)

rjvir• 10 years ago

Pokemon Go has shattered every record (downloads, engagement, revenue, etc). It's not just downloads.

mrb• 10 years ago

"there isn't much to do once you've caught them all"

This an extremely short-sighted comment. The developers created a digital world they can modify at will. They can add any number of items to collect, add mini games within the game, create new quests, etc. The possibilities are literally endless.

bbctol• 10 years ago

They better add those things really, really soon, before the userbase gets bored. Because right now, there isn't much to do once you've caught them all.

Bjartr• 10 years ago

You've just described a decade of dead in the water MMOs. Which isn't to say you're wrong, just that very few manage to capitalize on the opportunity.

markcerqueira• 10 years ago

"Short-sighted" if you're describing a product as what it is today and not what it can be in the future? Having the ability to do something and doing it right now are two different things.

As things stand, the statement "there isn't much to do once you've caught them all" is pretty on point, not short-sighted.

squeaky-clean2• 10 years ago

The possibilities are literally endless.

Yeah, but no one plays games for possibilities. Will Niantic actually be able to deliver fast enough?

hnal943• 10 years ago

You see this effect on Kickstarter also. The people who stand the best chance of funding large projects on kickstarter are people who have already proven their abilities outside of that format.

stcredzero3• 10 years ago

Pokémon Go is real genius in its combination of 3 elements that make it like lazing a stick of dynamite.

    1) You can walk around in immersive play
    2) There's opportunity for face to face interaction. 
    3) It's IP that a large part of the public cares about.

Of these, it's #1 that's the most critical. It's like the world is the world of Pokemon and you're a character in it like Ash.

bllguo3• 10 years ago

I disagree. The most critical part is #3. Were this not Pokemon hardly anyone would care.

Don't know much about Ingress but didn't it have #1 and #2 already..?

Al-Khwarizmi2• 10 years ago

there isn't much to do once you've caught them all

True, but how long does it take to actually catch'em all? Because I've been playing for 10 days, at maybe 1-2 hours per day on average, I've caught 46 out of 151 pokémon, and it gradually gets harder and harder to catch new ones due to their different rarities. This means that it might take (me) 100-200 hours to catch'em all, which is not bad for a game and especially for a mobile game.

And then, they have 5 more generations of Pokémon that they can add, to a total of 746. Plus trading, direct PvP, etc.

The challenge is to fix the server issues, crashes and problems like the 3-step bug before too many users get annoyed and leave. But if they do that, I think their playerbase can last quite long.

jandrese4• 10 years ago

You probably won't catch about 1/4 of the pokemon, you'll evolve them. This is where hatching eggs is really important, because each egg gives you a lot more candy than catching wild versions of the same monsters, and you need a decent amount of candy to evolve the higher level ones.

If they ever get trading working it would be a lot easier to fill out the last few holes in the roster.

BryantD7• 10 years ago

Although the hugely successful casual mobile games are, in fact, extremely grindy. Candy Crush Saga is nothing but a grind at high levels, with minimally complex gameplay.

The question isn't whether Pokemon Go will keep my interest. I'm not a typical mobile game consumer, and most of us here probably aren't. I think the core compulsion loop is a little bit thin without quite enough variety or randomness, but I'm not confident enough to make predictions.

TrevorJ2• 10 years ago

The Achilles heel (if there is one) is that the game is not something you can pick up and play whenever you happen to have a free moment. You have to be able to get up and go for a walk. Candy crush et al. can be played on the bus, in the restroom, in a meeting, on the couch, etc.

jedberg• 10 years ago

They need to add some aspect to the game that is playable at home.

An 11 year old kid can't go out at night and catch Pokemon on their own, but they sure as heck can sit at home playing games.

I'm an old man but I do most of my game playing from bed at night and in the morning (terrible habit I know) and so does my wife. I'd love to be able to add Pokemon to my daily games rotation but right now I can't.

soneil2• 10 years ago

I think I’d disagree. There’s no shortage of games you can play at home; with or without friends, online or off. And it’ll have a much more difficult time competing with them, because it’s a surprisingly shallow game.

But getting the same 11yo to spend his weekends in the park instead of on the couch .. that’s a turning point we’ve been missing for years.

clevernickname• 10 years ago

Why not pick up one of the mainline Pokemon games?

tammer• 10 years ago

Die-hard gamers will burn out quick but the minor attention investment required combined with the game-ification of recreational walking will keep games like this one popular for a very long time.

We're not dealing with people sitting and staring at a screen anymore. The game changes with the weather.

Mahn• 10 years ago

Shows you just how much pent up demand there was for Nintendo to release games on mobile.

Does it? My impression is that there's a lot more people playing Pokemon Go than there are Pokemon fans. The IP no doubt helped, but I don't think that you can just release any Nintendo IP on mobile and instantly have the massive virality success of Pokemon Go. There's something more to it than that.

dmoy2• 10 years ago

Yea, count me as one. I have literally never played any Pokemon game before, and half-caught maybe one episode of some TV show featuring some comical evil cat villain thing.

But, I'm catching pokemon on my walk to/from work (makes it less boring, and doesn't make it take any longer). My wife is now dragging me to the park every other day to run around in circles catching pokemon.

I'd be interested to see some survey results on what percentage of people playing this are actually pokemon fans.

egypturnash• 10 years ago

I'm not a fan of Pokemon but I'm playing it now and then just to see what this thing everyone's fascinated by is.

furyofantares• 10 years ago

I believe the high viral factor comes from going outside and seeing tons of people playing it and talking to strangers about it. That vitality has nothing to do with Pokemon specifically, but it's a factor that doesn't kick unless the game gets really big really quickly. And I think that initially enormous reception has to be largely credited to the IP.

kin4• 10 years ago

I think any Nintendo IP would do well from the brand itself. But you're right. Pokemon Go is different. As someone who once obsessed with Pokemon 20 years ago, this game is like living a childhood dream. I'm pretty sure many other like me are what drove the initial traction. Social media did the rest.

Hell, it hasn't even released in Japan yet.

ben_jones2• 10 years ago

Pokemon emulators have been available on mobile for a very long time. While I agree with most of what you're saying I think the phenomenon is more complex then just throwing something on the app store finally.

ajmurmann2• 10 years ago

Yes, especially since MiiTomo is out since months and nobody cared.

Fiahil2• 10 years ago

Billions? Certainly not. The game's fad will be over at the end of summer. Nobody is going to stay outside in parks by -10C.

Plus, the game is constantly crashing, draining battery, crashing again when the network goes down. It's been almost 3 weeks and they don't have fixed a single bug, and it's not like they're hard to reproduce or complex to understand where they come from. They literally didn't test their code before pushing it to the outside. It's not "Hard to scale" when you don't do things like "no caching client side", "mutate states concurrently without write ack". Come on, man.

Noted• 10 years ago

You're definitely mistaken that they haven't fixed a single bug. Server stability has greatly improved and the number of times the game freezes while trying to catch pokemon has dropped significantly.

downandout• 10 years ago

Yeah, no startup could ever duplicate this success. For HN purposes the fact that it's the most downloaded app in a week is sort of a meaningless data point. There's nothing instructive here that any other company on earth could use to have similar success.

ajmurmann2• 10 years ago

The fact that nobody here had even mentioned MiiTomo which came out on iOS months ago says a lot. It's not that just any Nintendo franchise is desired it's this particular game and franchise.

curiousgal2• 10 years ago

This game has become a victim of its own success. Niantic has be strangely silent about bugs and server outages. I foresee a massive drop in interest soon.

liquidise• 10 years ago

I keep seeing these comments foretelling the "inevitable" doomsday from the development community. This is a surprising sentiment. What Pokemon Go has shown, regardless of its future success, is a new ceiling for mobile app virality.

Also notable is that people always cite the issues as the reason for failure. But these issues have affected the app since day 0. Pokemon Go is having this success despite its technical flaws. Further evidence that building the right product trumps building a flawless product.

I say flip the narrative. What Pokemon Go has shown is that a product that fills a burning desire can achieve what seems like unprecedented success levels, quickly. The app doesn't need to be perfect. It needs to be something people want.

anthonybsd• 10 years ago

I've been playing since day one and I've already lost interest. Most everyone I've spoken to is of the same thinking. It was fun at the beginning but there is simply not enough substance in the game to keep anyone interested for more than 2-3 weeks. There are only so many Doduos and Pidgeys you can catch before you are bored out of your mind.

fpgaminer• 10 years ago

Terribly true, and in some ways disheartening. Pokemon Go is successful because of the branding and I find it hard to imagine any independent developer achieving even a faint modicum of the same success within the same category (geo-AR games) for lack of that branding. Heck, even amongst established, popular brands which other ones could possibly have gotten the necessary critical mass off their butts and outside playing the game? Pokemon was sort of the perfect storm in that sense.

And that, to me, is a shame. I quite like the overall geo-AR concept. I live in a wholly uninteresting, mostly depressed (economically) area. Pokemon Go brings vibrancy and life to the surroundings, making it worthwhile to get outside and explore this new "world".

But when Pokemon Go dies, the city will go back to being what it always was underneath; a bland mixture of concrete, terrible food, and pay day loans. Will anything be able to pick up Pokemon Go's mantle? I have my doubts, and that's disheartening.

davidsawyer• 10 years ago

building the right product trumps building a flawless product.

Y Combinator has been saying this for years, and I couldn't agree more. Niantic will iterate and fix problems, but Pokemon Go would have been doomed from the start if it wasn't what people wanted.

jachee• 10 years ago

Niantic has be strangely silent about bugs and server outages.

Honestly, this isn't surprising. Niantic isn't historically vocal about behind-the-scenes stuff.

hyperpallium• 10 years ago

"It's so crowded nobody goes there anymore"

Niantic has experience in longevity for this type of game https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingress_(video_game) ... Nintendo does too.

Though I wouldn't extrapolate too much from the first week meeting years of pent up demand.

seangrogg2• 10 years ago

The people that were interested in Ingress wanted a game that involved geolocation. The people that are playing Pokemon Go wanted a Pokemon game that put Pokemon "in their world". Unfortunately, Niantic is currently giving PoGo players a reskinned Ingress.

Their ability to maintain a small community of players interested in a geolocation game, while notable, does not extend to their ability to maintain a massive community of players interested in a Pokemon game.

I enjoy the game, but I'm playing for the same reason I continued to play .hack//Infection after I beat it: I'm making small investments in its future potential. But I refuse to spend a dime on it in its current state - a game that has neither the trading experience, the combat depth, or the sense of community that even the original Red and Blue versions offered out of the box.

empath75• 10 years ago

It's pretty easy to see just walking around the neighborhood that there's already been a drop in interest.

nommm-nommm• 10 years ago

Strange. In my neighborhood there has actually been an increase in players in the last week... They mostly come out at night though.

peter303• 10 years ago

Are they using the Google Cloud as the server?

leojg• 10 years ago

In most of the world it is not even available, it will continue burning for a couple of months and if they add PvP, trading and other good stuff that the gameboy games had they will ensure indefinite success.

vlunkr• 10 years ago

So in a thread about how massively successful this game is, we are all predicting the inevitable doom? Why? Of course one day it will die out, but so will literally every other game. So far these things have not stood in the way.

nperez• 10 years ago

I think they'll be in trouble if a competitor makes an AR game based on a similarly popular IP that is more smoothed out. I'm not sure feasible that is in the near future, but it could happen.

The bugs and lack of features aren't going to be a big problem for some people because for them, it's as much a "meeting random people" app as it is a game. It's an ice breaker. Fighting over the gym with people from the neighborhood. Doesn't need to be complicated.

aiyodev2• 10 years ago

Where I live, the public parks are full of crowds of people and have Pokemon Go signs telling them that the park closes at 11pm and must leave. The rail stations have Pokemon Go signs warning travelers to pay attention when crossing the tracks. Business are throwing Pokemon Go-themed events to bring in customers. Bars are offering Pokemon Go themed drinks with discounts for players.

I was downtown when there was a four-hour outage of the servers. I saw on my server monitor that the login server came back online. I logged in immediately. From my location I could see about two dozen Pokemon stops. None of them had lures. Within five minutes, half of them had lures.

Only a handful of immature children on the internet care about the minor bugs and server issues. There will be no drop in interest any time soon.

hogwash• 10 years ago

Funny retrospective on the last 25 years of AR:

http://unanimous.ai/augmented-reality-then-and-now/

TheMagicHorsey• 10 years ago

Have I missed something, or is this game just about walking around collecting pokemons with eggs? Is there anything else to it that I missed? The interface isn't illuminating.

nicky0• 10 years ago

There's a bit more to it than that, but essentially, yes. The "eggs" are called pokéballs.

hundchenkatze• 10 years ago

Well, the "eggs" aren't actually Pokéballs. The eggs are eggs that contain Pokémon and eventually hatch[0]. While Pokéballs are used to catch wild Pokémon[1].

[0] http://www.ign.com/wikis/pokemon-go/Eggs_and_Hatching [1] http://www.ign.com/wikis/pokemon-go/How_to_Catch_Pokemon

aram• 10 years ago

Honestly, I have exactly the same question. I saw dozen articles that talk about the thing but noone mentions exactly how it works / what happens after you catch a pokemon.

cloudjacker• 10 years ago

Interesting observation

So the thing is that nobody knew how it worked and all the information has been word of mouth from the process of deduction

annnnd people like it, which is the primary driving factor

(so the answer is open the app? if you are in a launched country)

gthtjtkt• 10 years ago

is this game just about walking around collecting pokemons with eggs?

Pretty much.

You can also battle to control gyms, but the rewards are pitiful and the combat system / pokemon types are so poorly implemented that it's basically a waste of time. Where I live, all the gyms change teams every minute or so.

So you collect pokemon, level up, and pray that Niantic will add some better features soon (trading, PvP, ladder system, more rewards for gyms, etc.). But there's no indication that they'll do so...

scaryclam• 10 years ago

There are actually some indications of enhancements and new features, trading being one that is confirmed: http://www.polygon.com/2016/7/12/12158480/pokemon-go-trading...

Cerium• 10 years ago

The game is an old school LAN party. You spend time face to face with your friends, shouting out to each other and having a good time. It gets you outside and after playing for a while you forget that it is imaginary. When one person sees a good Pokemon they will tell you where it is, not by showing a phone screen but by pointing to a location nearby.

Yes, it is just about walking around and collecting Pokemon.

Osiris• 10 years ago

75% of the time I launch the game, I'm confronted with an error that I couldn't be logged in.

Maybe the game is so popular because it feels like a rare resource. It's so hard to get into the game that when you do you have to play it as long as possible until the servers go down again.

kin4• 10 years ago

The numbers will absolutely drop. I mean, there's definitely a ton of content that can be added like earning gym badges, Gen 2-6 Pokemon (which people don't really care about), trading, PvP, etc. But, at the end of the day I doubt Niantic has the time/resources for that. The execution has been rather poor.

Still though there's a demand for Nintendo software on mobile. They just need to really to execute. They're really lucky we're tolerating these huge bugs (nearby Pokemon and frozen Pokeball after catch still outstanding).

dabeeeenster• 10 years ago

Got to love Hacker News! Fastest downloading app of all time, global phenomenon, absolute zeitgeist..."The execution has been rather poor."

Karunamon• 10 years ago

"Worse is Better" in action? :)

kin4• 10 years ago

You have to admit they're lucky we love Pokemon so much that we're willing to tolerate restarting the game every 2 minutes to continue playing the game. I'm on HN. When I say execution is poor, I'm referring to their technical execution. In terms of game design, as someone who puts in several hours a day into the game, the execution is of course great.

bllguo3• 10 years ago

Fastest downloading app of all time, global phenomenon, absolute zeitgeist

All three of which can be attributed in large part to the Pokemon IP, rather than any other characteristic of the game.

jhchen2• 10 years ago

Why is their execution poor? They've broken every record in usage and growth. Designing a back-end to expect and support that level of usage out the gate would have been poor execution.

Servers crashing and people still tolerating it is strong evidence they made something people want, which in my mind is excellent execution. I guarantee if they made a crappy game they will not have server problems or loud bug complaints.

stepanhruda3• 10 years ago

The tolerance comes from how much people love pokemon. The execution itself is terrible.

Fiahil2• 10 years ago

Designing a back-end to expect and support that level of usage out the gate would have been poor execution.

It would have been good engineering. But anyway, it's been almost 3 weeks, and they still haven't fixed anything. You can tolerate as much as you want, but it's still an extremely poor execution. Most of the low-hanging bugs could be fixed in _hours_ not days, certainly not weeks.

MattyRad• 10 years ago

When someone told me that Pokemon Go was exploding, I looked into it, and got really excited about its concept. People getting outside, interacting though a long-loved game, using real landmarks to denote checkpoints, playing a localized "king of the hill" type minigame. The architecture behind it and it really feels like it's using bleeding edge VR push us into a more social and fun world.

That said, I also feel like it's equally the biggest missed opportunity to date. Usually, I just see players walking, heads down, not talking. It was downright eerie when I was downtown one Tuesday night at midnight, and it was dead quiet despite ~60 Pokemon players meandering about. They should have introduced PvP earlier (hopefully it's around the corner!), and better yet, make it so you get more exp for battling people you haven't battled before. Spur people into social interaction!

0x0• 10 years ago

I think they've solved the battle mechanics very elegantly by avoiding direct PvP, likely on purpose, to prevent too many real-world confrontations escalating.

kevindong2• 10 years ago

My experience (being on a college campus, however dead it may be during the summer) has been the opposite. People who otherwise wouldn't talk to each other are openly walking up to each other to talk about Pokemon Go.

A coworker of mine and his girlfriend have also started hanging out (as in, indoors and double dating by not playing Pokemon together) with another couple they met while hunting for Pokemon.

2bitencryption• 10 years ago

You know that one mobile "space pilot" game? The one where everyone's phone displays different elements of a fictional spacecraft, with buttons labeled "Power Overdrive" and knobs and levers to pull with crazy names? And players get instructions they need to shout to other players, like "Whoever has the Neutrino Ray, set it to 4!"

Basically, the game forces one big fun social interaction by requiring players to exchange information to stay alive.

How could this work with Pokemon Go? I don't know. Currently the only social exchanges are "There's a Blastoise over here!" (which is pretty darn cool). But maybe more could be done. Some type of puzzle where one person in an area is designated the "Puzzle leader," and gets to rely information to other people...

anchpop• 10 years ago

The name of that game is Spaceteam, by the way

AlexKang• 10 years ago

Ooo! You're talking about Spaceteam I presume?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sleepingbe...

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spaceteam/id570510529?mt=8

blhack2• 10 years ago

I think that the biggest feature that Pokemon Go will add, that will hopefully come soon, is the ability to broadcast your position.

This is something that I wish ingress had done. The game is a multiplayer game, there is no doubt about that. I'd love to be able to open map map, see that some of my friends are over playing at $foo location, and then go meet them there.

TeMPOraL8• 10 years ago

Ingress had at least a proxy for that - an in-game chat with distance-filtering, i.e. you could limit messages you see to sources closer than X kilometers. As for third-party tools, someone somehow made a player tracker once; I think it used changes in portal owners to narrow down your location.

blhack2• 10 years ago

I think that the player tracker could get you banned from the game, though. It technically violates the ToS.

rezashirazian2• 10 years ago

I built a chat app for pokemon go that allows people within a 5 mile radius to chat anonymously. It also has a crowd sourced pokemon spawn map where people can broadcast and located pokemons within their vicinity.

Once I can get Apple to stop rejecting it I'll post a link.

melling• 10 years ago

So, do we have an entirely new class of games/apps that are about to appear? Like Pokémon go but for ...

rezashirazian2• 10 years ago

Yes. I bet you plenty of companies are already on it as we speak.

kevindong2• 10 years ago

The dropoff in interest has already started. I pretty much stopped playing last week. I got to level 14 and the amount of grinding required was just ridiculous (the amount of XP you earn per action does not increase as you level up meanwhile the XP required to level up goes up exponentially). The bugginess of the game really did not help.

The dropoff in interest has already, objectively speaking, started[0]. It's currently (as of July 22) 66% of its peak (per Google Trends). In my personal experience, interest on my college campus has already subsided. It's not completely dead, mind you, but the hype is over.

[0] https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=pokemon%20go&date=to...

mp3geek• 10 years ago

How does the numbers stack up between the downloads on Google play vs Apple?

meerita• 10 years ago

A game can't have everything the first day of launch. They released this to test it against the market. Now that it is a success, changes will come to increase retention and purchases. Now the next biggest events will be promoted also with Pokemon things to do in the place, like "get this rare pokemon on the Vegas Electronic Event. The game is a real success and the mechanics described by Richard Bartle proved that people loves to collect, it is the Diogenes syndrome but in mobile version.

Bonsailinse• 10 years ago

These numbers are probably the reason why niantic was totally caught by surprise and have these massive server issues. I really don't like to see the app offline every time I have to go for a longer walk, but hey, I take it easy and wait for either niantiv upgrading their ressources or the userbase to shrink, which shouldn't take too long imo.

xlayn• 10 years ago

As time pass there are more iDevices.... so the number can be irrelevant. So maybe a percentage as download/devices?

Apple says Pokémon Go is the most downloaded app in its first week ever

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