News

Pokemon GO’s Japan launch three times as big as US release

Global launch had 50x more players than expected

Pokemon GO’s Japan launch three times as big as US release

Pokemon GO had three times the number of users signing up to play the game in Japan than it did when it was released in the US.

A blog post from Google has delved into the huge launch of the mobile sensation and discussed just how how unprepared Google and Niantic Labs were for the game’s popularity.

Rapid growth

The two companies had forecasted player traffic at a set amount - which has not been revealed - with provisions in place to support five times that amount on the Google Cloud as a “worst case scenario”.

The game also took just 15 minutes to surpass Niantic’s expectations for player traffic when it first launched in Australia and New Zealand.

The game then rocketed to 50x its initial target for player traffic.

Image credit: Google

To support huge numbers of players Niantic had to work with Google to provide extra server capacity to keep the game stable.

Despite being a phenomenon in Australia, New Zealand and the West and shattering records for download numbers and revenues in mobile, the blog post claims Pokemon GO’s lauch in Japan was even bigger.

“The lessons-learned from the US launch - generous capacity provisioning, the architectural swap to the latest version of Container Engine, along with the upgrade to the HTTP/S Load Balancer - paid off when the game launched without incident in Japan, where the number of new users signing up to play tripled the US launch two weeks earlier,” said Google Director of Customer Reliability Engineering Luke Stone.

Pokemon GO remains a top 10 grossing game on the App Store in the US and Japan since its launch.

Niantic recently revealed Pokemon GO has been downloaded more than 500 million times since its launch in July.

Tags:
Head of Content

Craig Chapple is a freelance analyst, consultant and writer with specialist knowledge of the games industry. He has previously served as Senior Editor at PocketGamer.biz, as well as holding roles at Sensor Tower, Nintendo and Develop.