If there is a goal to Pokémon Go-or, indeed, to any Pokémon game-it is the catchphrase laid out in the opening credits of the anime: “ Gotta catch ’em all.” More than 20 years after the first Game Boy game debuted, “all” has become a moving target as subsequent games have introduced new generations of Pokémon. “Our challenge was making sure the players that stuck around didn’t feel like this was something that was going to be going away,” he says.
Steranka, who now serves as Pokémon Go’s director of product marketing, was among those tasked with figuring out what came next. That first burst, he says, was the result of “a perfect storm”: a potent mix of nostalgia for the Pokémon franchise, the novelty of the game’s augmented reality features, and a level of simplicity that made it accessible to users who might not otherwise have identified as gamers. He was one of the first group of new hires brought in after the initial hurricane of interest had subsided. When Michael Steranka first joined Niantic, Pokémon Go had been out in the wild for about nine months. In terms of popularity, it isn’t quite what it once was, but, well, who among us is? The game grew out of its early glitches real-world weather and seasons now affect gameplay, and dreamy scenery is gradually replacing the flat blue-green map of old. Players can now battle one another live, fight Team Rocket, join together to take down high-level Pokémon that appear in local gyms, and send gifts to far-flung Pokéfriends.
(I can confirm that PokeDad is lovely, and that his PokeChildren are orders of magnitude less interested in the game than he and his PokeWife.) To those who wonder about the dozens (of dozens of dozens!) of us who’ve stuck around, I can at least say that Pokémon Go is a much better game in 2021 than it was in 2016. This is the way that I live my life now, which means that I get asked that same old question somewhat more than rarely. Once, I met a stranger on the street to trade for a rare turtle, and if anyone has any leads on small Rattatas or giant Magikarps, I’m interested. I got the weird sheep thing, and paid actual money-money that I earned at my job, and with which I might have invested in the future or bought a doughnut or something-for a special add-on that makes my avatar stand in a funny mime pose. My Raichus now sport no fewer than 11 different silly hats. Yes, dear reader, I’m still playing, too-still cursing when Pikachus break out of excellent throws still slipping and sliding on icy mornings as I shuffle off to catch a rare snowflake. In spite of being explicitly designed for venturing outside and meeting up with other players (two activities that are decidedly not shutdown-friendly), a handful of tweaks, like enabling players to pick up items and battle monsters from greater distances, fueled a Pokémon Go resurgence: Monthly active users grew 15 percent through the first five months of this year, while spending spiked 49 percent, according to app analyst Sensor Tower the firm also says that 2020 was the game’s most profitable year yet. Not even the pandemic could shake the game’s status. Parent company Niantic, which does not make player statistics or revenue figures public, says that the game has now been downloaded more than 1 billion times. On the contrary: While the days of honest-to-Willow stampedes in Central Park at the sight of a Vaporeon might have come and gone, the game remains a sensation. Perhaps you count yourself among the 500 million who downloaded the game back in the summer of 2016 and spent whole giddy days chasing Electabuzzes and Charmeleons before hanging up your trainer cap for good.īut Pokémon Go did not go away when the roving hordes of Pidgey chasers did. “You’re still playing Pokémon Go?”Īs it happens, five years after the app’s blockbuster release, a whole lot of people are doing just that. Maybe they witness a run-in with a stranger known to you only as PokeDad082798279833, who cryptically mentions something about becoming “ultra friends” as you turn scarlet. Maybe they hear you slip up and count kilometers instead of miles. Maybe they catch a glimpse of a red-and-white ball on your phone screen. You can always tell when someone’s going to say it.
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