Data from the Sensor Tower information platform shows that in the first 10 months of 2020, the total revenue of the mobile game "Pokémon GO" (developed by Niantic) has exceeded US$1 billion (approximately CNY6.66 billion).

Since its launch in July 2016, "Pokémon GO" has still been popular among players now. The total revenue of this game reached US$832 million (approximately CNY5.56 billion) at the end of 2016. Although total players’ spending dropped by 29% in 2017, the revenue of "Pokémon GO" sustained continuous growth in the subsequent three years, also, it set a new record in 2020. Only in the first ten months of 2020, the total global players’ spending of "Pokémon GO" was 11% higher than the full-year of 2019, 30% increase on period-to-period comparison.  

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Due to the spread of the Covid-19 and the implementation of the home quarantine policy globally, the number of downloads and revenue of mobile games have increased substantially. Nintendo also caught this opportunity to bring home-game function to "Pokémon GO", allowing players to enjoy the game without going out. At the same time, there are also players taking "Pokémon GO" as a safe way to conduct outdoor activities during the epidemic.

In the first 10 months of 2020, "Pokémon GO" ranked 3rd in the global players’ spending list (excluding the third-party Android store). The top two games are Tencent’s “Player Unknown's Battlegrounds” Mobile version (PUBG Mobile) and "Honor of Kings". Israeli game company Moon Active’s "Coin Master" and Japanese game company Mixi’s "Monster Strike" ranked 4th and 5th respectively. "Pokémon GO" ‘s total revenue exceeded US$4 billion.

Since its launch, “Pokémon GO”’s global players’ cumulative spending has reached US$4.2 billion (approximately CNY27.95 billion). Among those, the U.S. market has the highest revenue, amounting to US$ 1.5 billion (approximately CNY9.98 billion), accounting for 36.3% of total players’ spending. Japan ranked 2nd with revenue of US$1.3 billion (approximately CNY 8.65 billion), accounting for 31.3% of the total revenue.  The third-ranked German market has revenue of US$238.6 million (approximately CNY1.59 billion), accounting for 5.7% of the total revenue.

In terms of platforms, Google Play is the most important revenue platform for the game, contributing more than US$2.2 billion (approximately CNY14.64 billion) of revenue, accounting for about 53.4% of total revenue. The remaining 46.6% revenue comes from the Apple App Store, which is approximately US$1.9 billion (approximately CNY12.64 billion).

So far, "Pokémon GO" has been downloaded nearly 600 million times globally. Among the global markets, the U.S. market has the largest number of downloads, 109 million, accounting for 18.2% of the total downloads; Brazil has 65.20 million downloads ranked 2nd , accounting for nearly 11%. Mexico ranked 3rd with 37.30 million downloads, accounting for 6.2%.

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In terms of platform, the download of "Pokémon GO" mainly comes from the Google Play store, from which, the number of downloads is approximately 466 million, accounting for 78% of the total. The remaining 22% of downloads come from App Store, which is about 132 million times.

2020 is the year of highest revenue in the history of "Pokémon GO". At the same time, the current total players’ spending on "Pokémon GO" is also ranked 3rd globally, which proves that the continuous push of updates and real-time activities will help to ensure the attractiveness of the game.

In some respects, the way "Pokémon GO" operates make it originally not having the traits to be extremely popular in 2020. However, its rapid response to the global players’ needs, as well as bringing in Nintendo’s updates timely, made it a further success this year. This once again proves continuous updates has positive influence on the long-term development and monetization capabilities of mobile games.