The Pokemon GO game that was released by Niantic Labs in partnership with Nintendo is set to join the billion downloads club. Developers at Niantic Labs have announced a few days ago during the 2017 Game Developers Conference that the game has been downloaded well over 650 million times since its release in July of 2016.
This is a massive gain since their last official stat release when they stated that their Pokemon GO game had been downloaded more than 500 million times back in September of 2016. That’s a massive achievement of 150 million downloads in just 5 months. In addition, the developers at Niantic Labs also revealed that all Pokemon GO players combined have walked up to 8.7 Billion KM (5.4 Billion Miles). In retrospect, that’s like walking the distance to Pluto.
However, compared to its monumental uprise back in July of 2016, it is comparatively very slow. This figure is predicted to slow down as time progresses with more and more users dropping out of interest for the game. Niantic Labs, however, have been trying to keep users interested with monthly updates.
Recently they released a major update to the public by introducing 80 new Pokemon for players to catch. This is the first major upgrade Niantic has come out with for the game ever since it’s release. Regardless of the download rate being slowed down, it is believed that with the way the game is going, it will reach the billion downloads club in no time, and could possibly be the first smartphone game to ever reach the milestone.
The game initially broke records when it first came out onto the App Stores by becoming one of the biggest applications in use. It even took over Twitter for most active users in a given period of time. This too just after a few weeks of release.
The game was also a landmark and a milestone in the gaming world by being one of the first, and most successful augmented reality game to ever be released online. The technology implemented into the game took the developers of the game at Niantic Labs a research of at least 10 years.
The video trailer of Pokemon GO alone ranked up 42 Million views:
Therefore, it is no surprise as to how well the game did when it first launched. Especially given the uniqueness of the idea and concept behind it. Bringing Pokemon into the real world. Without a doubt, most players of the game have been adoring fans of the original Pokemon show and games.