Pokemon GO revenue on the decline, will likely continue to decline “to some degree”
Posted on October 31, 2016 by Zack in Mobile, News
Pokemon GO has been a runaway success for Niantic and the Pokemon Company, but it seems its wild popularity is dwindling – at least compared to other mobile game titans.
A collection of data regarding Pokemon GO and its overall decline in revenue has been posted on the Survey Monkey Intelligence blog, detailing how steep the decline in revenue is. During it’s peak month of July and some time afterwards, Pokemon GO was the most profitable mobile game by a very wide margin. However, its revenue generation has shrunk to levels that are more comparable to other mobile games, such as Mobile Strike, Game of War and Clash Royale. In the blog post, its mentioned that the revenue generation of Pokemon GO has fallen to a level that puts it on par with Candy Crush Saga. Furthermore, the author believes that this downward trend will continue to a certain degree:
October saw Pokémon GO’s daily revenues fall below those of Game of War, Mobile Strike, and Clash Royale, who are now vying for the top grossing game spot.
Pokémon GO’s revenue stats on U.S. smartphones have put it essentially on par with Candy Crush Saga… for the moment. (We expect Pokémon GO revenues will keep falling to some degree.)
A positive takeaway from the data posted in the blog is that the Average revenue per daily active user (or ARPDAU, a metric used in mobile gaming to help understand monetization rates for genres) for Pokemon GO is the third highest out of all genres in mobile gaming. However, this is somewhat of a loaded metric for Pokemon GO. ARPDAU relies on other, comparable titles in each genre to exist so that the data of a single title has meaning. In the case of Pokemon GO, there are no other similar titles that are anywhere near as successful as Pokemon GO, so the data loses much of its value.
Stacked-up against the average of most mobile game categories, Pokémon GO’s current ARPDAU rate of ~$0.21 on U.S. smartphones looks quite respectable. Only role-playing and strategy games tend to make more money on a per-user basis.
But, again, without a point of comparison from a similar AR search-and-capture game (or better yet: a set of AR search-and-capture games), we don’t know if Pokémon GO’s average revenue per daily active user is exceptionally good or if it has room for improvement.
Much of what we’re hearing about Pokemon GO these days seems to be about declining revenue, but the title is still a record breaking game that set the world on fire with Pokemania, if only for a few months.
You can read the full post here.
