The amount of money players were spending on Pokémon GO shot up as soon as most of the world went into lockdown.
In many ways, the video game industry will have experienced something of a boom over the course of the past three months. Not only are gamers stuck at home playing more, and maybe trying out titles they wouldn't have previously considered, lapsed and non-gamers will have also picked up a controller to pass the time.
Even though some people will have turned to their phones as a viable gaming option, Pokémon GO was one title we expected to struggle. However, Niantic was quick to act and made sure its popular AR game was easy to play either from home or while social distancing. Some of the ways in which it has done that is via dropping the walking requirement for Battle League and adding Remote Raid Passes to the game.
It seems as if Niantic's measures have paid off. In fact, judging by the numbers published by Statista, Pokémon GO was an immediate hit during lockdown. On the week starting March 16, 2020, the week in which many countries started taking COVID-19 seriously, Pokémon GO players spent $23 million in-game.
To put that into perspective, it was almost $10 million more than the amount spent the week before, and $6 million higher than the next best week of the year up until that point. What's surprising is the spike happened before Niantic had put most of Pokémon GO's social distancing measures in place. Perhaps players thought that week would be the last time they would get to play the game before various lockdowns were enforced.
The figures for the weeks after that will be interesting, as fewer people left their homes and Niantic made numerous changes to the game. Before all this, the developer's aim was to have an even bigger year in 2020 than it did in 2019, which was Pokémon GO's biggest year to date. At the start of all this, that goal appeared to be off the table. However, it seems that it may still be an achievable target.
Source: Golden Casino News