Despite the fact that large parts of the world are currently undergoing various degrees of lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, Pokémon Go, a game that requires you to actually go outside to play it, has just experienced a 67% increase in sales. How? Well, developer Niantic has made several to tweaks to how the game works in order to account for people’s restricted mobility.
First of all, you may have noticed that more Pokémon were appearing in, or around, your house. That’s because of changes to the way spawns work, now allowing you to catch more monsters without the need to leave your home. Eggs, which usually required a long walk to hatch, have had their kilometre count shortened to allow you to hatch them with far less pavement-pounding.
Secondly, there have been a bunch of sales and discounts on key items, enabling people to pick up a bargain or two. This helped to improve sales figures for items that you don’t necessarily need when you can’t go walkabouts. Now’s a good time to restock for when the world (hopefully) returns back to normal.
Overall, these two measures have resulted in a huge spike in sales, amounting to just over 67% extra revenue during a time when location-based games would have been predicted to suffer.
As you can see from the SensorTower graph below, which charts weekly earnings this year across all of the official app stores, Pokémon Go had a considerable increase in income during the week commencing March 16, which was right in the middle of widespread lockdowns around the globe.
If you’d like to get involved in all of the stay-at-home shenanigans, grab Pokémon Go from the App Store or Google Play right now. You can also follow recent events on the official live site, Facebook, or Twitter.