Niantic’s Pokémon GO exploded with popularity when it released on iOS and Android in July of 2016. The app game that once had millions of active users has since suffered a drastically dwindling player base, and there’s data to prove it.
The Pokémon-hunting app game used to have almost 30 million players. You couldn’t turn a corner without seeing someone searching for a Bulbasaur or hanging around a PokéStop. Now, according to a new report by comScore (as reported by Nintendo Life), Pokémon GO has lost 4 out of 5 players who started playing the game at launch.
The comScore graph, pictured below, shows that Pokémon GO reached its highest user count at 28.5 million United States players on July 13th, 2016, which was a week after the app launched. That’s an incredible amount, but it was only downhill from there.
By the end of the game’s first month on the market, active players dropped to 20 million. And that figure was cut in half to 10 million by September. By the end of 2016, Pokémon GO was sustaining around 5 million daily players. That’s still a lot of users, but it’s only a fraction of where the game started.
Pokémon GO began as a fun augmented reality game with lots of potential, but it couldn’t sustain the interest of players over time. Perhaps this is due to Niantic’s withholding of new features. Gen 2 didn’t release until 9 months after the game’s launch, and players still can’t catch those Legendary Pokémon. Also, there’s still no PvP battles or trading–two huge features many players thought should be essential to a Pokémon app game.
It’s important to note comScore’s data only represents U.S. players from July 2016 to December 2016, so we don’t have any exact numbers for 2017 yet. Gen 2 brought back some straying players for sure, but overall the interest in Pokémon GO has faded too radically to not admit something is off.
Are you among the 80% of players who have stopped hunting for Pokémon on your smartphone? Would you jump back in with more PvP features? Let us know in the comments.