People are curious about Pokemon GO popularity rapid decrease as the AR game-Pokemon GO popularity is going down faster in Korea than any other countries. Local mobile game firms, who are preparing to launch their own AR game, analyzed that the factors such as simple game play repetition, lack of various contents, battle difficulty among users and high data consumption might be the reason of rapid decrease of Pokemon GO popularity. Local game firms are considering the disadvantage of Pokemon GO as a ‘good lesson’ and are planning to make up those disadvantages to their new games.

According to a market research company-Wise app, 6 million 430 thousand users during February 6~12 (based on the survey under 20,000 android phone users across country), have used Pokemon GO over one time. This figure shows that the game use rate was decreased to 520 thousand people (7%) comparing to previous week of survey. Daily users were estimated about 2 million 910 thousand people in the first day of the game launch last month and recorded pick number with 5 million 240 thousand users on January 28. After that the user number has started decreasing and it went down to 3 million 360 thousand users on February 13. This figures shows that the game users were decreased over 2 million within 15 days.


Remaining installers of Pokemon GO were about 8 million 470 thousand and decreased up to 8 million 340 thousand people on February 13. Remaining installer means the users, who have not deleted the game app.


Game industry experts analyzed the main reason of Pokemon GO popularity rapid decrease and indicated that a simple game structure without any additional fun of Pokemon GO make users ‘bored’. It shows that Korean game players’ faster game content consumption speed and faster content change speed to other games than any other countries.


A representative of one local game firm, which is developing AR game, said that ‘Pokemon collection and simple nurturing process make fast Korean users, whose a content consumption is fast, bored. And local game firms must get good lesson from weak point of Pokemon GO and make differentiated game content beyond simple hunting.’

A representative of another AR game development firm indicated that ‘one of the weak points of Pokemon GO is that users must to battle place to proceed with battle among users with collected pokemons. And Korean users want to battle immediately without moving to a battle place. If they cannot battle, they simply move on to another game content’. The battle place means the space where users can battle with collected pokemons.

Another disadvantage of the game is excessive data consumption. According to Wise app, an hour data consumption was estimated 3.17MB per person during February 6~12. This data consumption is almost equal to high advanced game content-‘Lineage 2 Revolution’ data consumption-4.13MB. This is one of the weak points of the game which needs to be fixed as its data consumption is equal to high advanced RPG (Role Playing Games).

Another inconvenience is that it is not easy to find ‘pocket stop’ (the place, where users can get ‘pocket ball’ to catch pokemons) in the regions other than Seoul.

A representative of the game industry stated that ‘There are numerous game players, who change their location intentionally through GPS due to unequal pokemon appearance. Those problems must be solved by game firms’.

On the other hand, over 10 local and foreign-made AR games such as CatchMON’ of Mgame, casual hunting AR game (game name has not been published) of Hanbitsoft along with ‘Special ForceAR’ of Dragonfly to be launched within this year.

By Kim Soo Yeon newsnews@


[ copyright ⓒ The Digitaltimes ]