Pokémon Go’s Fourth Anniversary: The Journey Continues - "Pokémon Go is at its best place yet with much more in store for the years ahead"

4th Anniversary art by niantic

People Still Play This?

In partnership with the Pokémon Company, Niantic released Pokémon Go in July of 2016 to wide praise. The love for the franchise gained over two decades combined with the appeal of exploring the real world to catch Pokémon and battle for control of gyms launched the popularity of the augmented-reality (AR) game. Niantic previously worked on their own AR game, Ingress, but the success of Pokémon Go popularized the genre. Plenty of other AR games have been released but none have reached the level of Pokémon Go’s triumph.

Pokémon Go had a huge player decline a few months after the hype died down but still managed to catch a record $832 million in 2016. The following year, 2017, felt the effect of the player decrease with $589 million revenue earned. While it seemed like the hype had finally ended, the following years saw a big return in revenue. In 2018, player spending increased finishing the year with $816 million and a new record in 2019 with $894 million earned.

Four More Years!

The high earnings for the first year were due to the game’s hype but the dedicated core player base continues to support it to this day. Niantic has greatly improved the game since its launch by listening to the community for changes and balances. New features including raid battles, player-versus-player, and monthly events have kept players engaged and brought back old players. These improvements have refreshed the game but there are still unresolved bugs annoying players. New content is always being added but the game really needs quality of life updates for longevity.

The updates over the last four years have been very effective in keeping players interested while still managing to push in-app purchases. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, the spending for Pokémon Go didn’t decline but actually increased. Niantic quickly adjusted the game to allow players to “safely” play the game by increasing the interaction distance in-game and adding remote raids. These changes led to Niantic’s highest earnings ever for the first half of the year, even beating out their first year, and putting them on track to break their 2019 record.

The Journey Continues…

Pokémon Go today is not the same game that came out in the summer of 2016. The game didn’t even have half the features showed in the launch trailer. The trailer showed trainers coming together to battle legendary Pokémon in raids, which weren’t added until June 2017. It also lacked one of the core fundamentals of Pokémon, the ability to trade with friends. The joy of exploration and catching Pokémon quickly faded with the constant server issues at the game’s launch. People were angry and dropped the game but a lot has changed since then.

Niantic has done a pretty good job of adapting mechanics from the Pokémon games into Pokémon Go. For example, one of the best mechanics added is the dynamic weather system, which changes the kind of Pokémon players encounter depending on the real weather around them. Niantic will have no shortage of features to add to the game in order to keep players interested in the following years. However, Niantic has a bigger battle on their hands.

Niantic’s lack of transparency is dishonest to their player base. Developers who release games with loot boxes or similar randomized purchasable in-game items on the Apple and Google app stores are required by their guidelines to “disclose the odds of receiving each type of item to customers prior to purchase.”

Eggs now show hatchable Pokemon.