It was a successful year for Pokemon GO, according to the latest data from Sensor Tower. The game generated $795,000,000 in worldwide revenue during 2018. This is an increase of 35% over 2017. According to Sensor Tower, “the game was pushed across the 2018 finish line by a strong December that saw global player spending on the App Store and Google Play exceed $75,000,000, an increase of 32% over the $57,200,000 spent during the same month in 2017”. The game generated an average revenue of “nearly $2,200,000 per day during 2018, up from $1,600,000 in 2017”.
Sensor Tower also says that “players in the United States spent the most in Pokémon GO go last year, to the tune of $262,000,000 or 33% of all gross revenue—the same percentage they contributed in 2017. Japanese players, by comparison, spent about $239,000,000, or 30% of the game’s revenue in 2018, up from the 25% they contributed in 2017”. Players have spent a grand total of $2,200,000,000 on the game since Pokemon GO launched in July of 2016. Sensor Tower speculates that this lifetime revenue total could surpass $3,000,000,000 by the end of 2019.
Curious how this compares with some of the Switch’s best games? I’m sure some of you fine folks know those stats.
If 100% of Nintendo’s sales were digital for Mario Odyssey (their top Switch seller so far), it would have generated $750-800 million total revenue (~12.5 million sales x $60 retail price). When I worked in retail years back, retail’s profit margin was somewhere around 20% or less on a game, so you’d need retail sales vs digital sales to get a real number. You may be looking at something like $675,000,000 if you assume a very rough 50/50 split physical to digital. I’m not sure if when they’re saying gross revenue for Pokemon Go, if that’s before or after the app store takes its cut. If it’s before, the titles are actually pretty close in revenue, especially since app store’s cut is 30%, a good bit higher than retail.
Another thing worth considering is that a big Switch game like Mario is what we call a system seller. A certain percentage of those game sales are also generating new console sales. So there’s kind of a hidden revenue from that software if we consider that there are console buyers who wouldn’t have bought the console if that software wasn’t made. And then that hardware sale might result in more software sales, generating even more revenue.
I can’t believe people still play this casual game. And I thought that even when it first released.
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