As of today, Nintendo's augmented reality game is five years old. That's half a decade. We've gone from Hillary Clinton proclaiming, "Pokemon Go to the polls!" to an entire celebration of Bidoof. It's come a long way, and it's made a lot of cash - $5 billion to be precise.
That's a whole Spider-Man: Far From Home per year. Or, in total, it's the equivalent of Avengers: Endgame and Titanic's box office gross put together. It's not too surprising given that Niantic's game has managed to land a staggering 632 million downloads.
However, a large amount of that income is directly from the US - $1.9 billion to be precise. Meanwhile, 52% of its revenue comes from Android while the remaining 48% can be attributed to iOS. It's split down the middle, more or less. Already, in the first half of 2021, it has managed to make Nintendo and Niantic $641.6 million. That's just from January to June.
It's actually the best year for the game thus far. In 2017's first half, it made $278 million which went up by 21% to $336 million in the first half of 2018. This year, that number has doubled. 2021 has seen a 34% growth from 2020.
Even with a pandemic, Nintendo's augmented reality Pokemon hit is thriving, and it doesn't look to be slowing down anytime soon.
To celebrate its fifth anniversary, there's a brand new special event running from today until Thursday, July 15, where you can get yourself a flying Pikachu and a shiny Darumaka. There are also in-game fireworks, stickers, a real-time sky mechanic, and more.