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Pokemon GO racks up 650 million downloads

Players walk a combined 8.7 billion km

Pokemon GO racks up 650 million downloads

Pokemon GO has been downloads more than 650 million times in less than a year after launch.

Speaking at GDC 2017, Niantic CTO Phil Keslin appeared on stage to discuss the development of Pokemon GO and some of the latest stats from the hit mobile title.

He said the game originally had nine engineers on the team, five designers and two producers.

Critical hit

Upon release, the popularity of the game meant that the number of people trying to play the game was around 50x what the developer had anticipated.

Despite being overwhelmed by such unprecedented interest, the team has since managed to stabilise the game’s servers which had struggled to cope with the sheer amount of players at launch.

To date, players have walked up a combined 8.7 billion km, which is great than the distance between Earth and Pluto.

Pokemon GO’s most recent update added 80 new pokemon from the second generation games Gold and Silver.

The additions and slight gameplay challenges saw Pokemon GO once again rise to the top of the grossing charts.


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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.