Pokémon GO may not be in the peak of fame as it once was, but it’s still doing VERY well for itself. A new report by SuperData shows that the free to play mobile game scraped together an impressive $1.92 billion last year.
SuperData tracks industry trends, profits, and so on. They provide market data to various companies, showing them, and the public, what’s doing well. They recently released a PDF that showed a chart of the most profitable free-to-play games of 2020. Pokémon GO sat comfortably in fifth place.
What makes this so fascinating is that this is a notable jump up from 2019, when the game only pulled in $894 million. They managed to more than double their revenue during a worldwide pandemic, despite being a game about going out and being in public.
This is largely attributed to Niantic’s active efforts in revising the game into a more remote-possible game. Free item packs were given out to save folks from needing to visit popular PokéStops, and events like Pokémon GO Fest were made entirely remote, allowing anyone in the world to participate in the weekend full of special in-game events.
Congratulations Niantic for making the most of a very difficult year.