Pokémon Go- Spread and Decline of a Viral Phenomenon
This summer a mobile augmented reality (AR) game called Pokémon Go exploded into popularity in early July. With almost no advertising done by the companies that made the game, the game became the most downloaded mobile app ever in its first few days. According to SurveyMonkey Intelligence, the game peaked at around 40 million weekly active users in the United States around July 24th, 2 weeks after launch. After that, it declined, losing about 35% of its weekly active users every month. After the first month, it went down to 25 million. After two months, it went down to 16 million. Three months, 10.5 million. Four months, less than 8 million. To be fair, 8 million is still a sizable number of users and still makes Pokémon Go the most used mobile gaming app. However, it’s nowhere near how popular it was in July. What happened?
I’m going to look at Pokémon Go’s rise and fall in terms of viral marketing: the phenomenon of technologies spreading through social networks. Pokémon Go is a game that is perfect for groups of people to play together. The wild Pokémon available in the game are instanced for each user, meaning that each user has access to their own set of wild Pokémon in the world to catch and isn’t competing with other users. This allows people to walk with other people while playing the game. Not only this, there are items in the game called lure modules which a player can drop at designated locations, attracting Pokémon to that location for every player there. This is the main reason that playing in a group is beneficial. Everyone benefits from there being more people due to those people being more likely to drop lures. For gyms, having more people of one’s team around helps greatly to have a greater chance of taking over a gym and to increase the strength of the gym once it’s taken over. Some people, not wanting to walk, decided to look for Pokémon in a car driving around the neighborhood. For the people using this method, it helped having a designated driver who wasn’t playing the game at the time to drive a player or multiple players around, another example where having another person around is beneficial.
The direct real life interaction and the benefits of playing in a group allowed Pokémon Go to spread primarily by word of mouth without any advertising needed. The game had a positive network effect. Millions of people were doing what they always dreamed of doing as kids, going around catching Pokémon in the world, and millions of other people participated in the phenomenon even though they may have never played Pokémon before to either not feel left out, to get some exercise, or to help their more dedicated friends. In terms of viral marketing, the first group of people (Pokémon dreamers) had a very low threshold to start playing. All it took for these people was one friend, one post on a social media site, or one article in the news to tell them about the game, and they instantly downloaded and started playing it. The second group of people (tag-alongers) had much higher thresholds, but knowing enough people playing the game and reading enough posts or tweets on social media, they started playing too. But the main reason Pokémon Go exploded was the first group’s absurdly low thresholds. Without that, many of them would not have started playing and almost none of the second group would have joined. Another Pokémon AR game probably wouldn’t do as well as Pokémon Go did even if it is much better and funner than Pokemon Go due to the novelty wearing off, causing the Pokemon dreamers to have higher thresholds before they try another Pokémon AR game.
This leads to the next question. Why did Pokémon Go decline so rapidly in their player base after the first couple of weeks? Some obvious answers outside of networks are the novelty wearing off, people getting bored after reaching a high enough level or reaching their original personal goal, the lack of updates, the removal of good features like tracking, and the weather outside getting colder. These probably contributed a vast amount to the game’s decline and a vast amount to its decline in terms of networks, too. We can look at the decline in terms of the opposite of the spread. The threshold for “keep playing the game” for each player increased as the reasons stated previously happened. The first massive group to go was probably a large subsection of the Pokémon dreamers, which may be surprising. Why wouldn’t the tag-alongers be the first to go? I say this because the Pokémon dreamers had crazily low thresholds and the fact that the novelty wore off probably impacted them the most. The game, which was originally a heavenly dream to experience catching Pokémon in the real world, became a reality for several weeks and that original hype over the dream clearly died down. Their thresholds increased rapidly from their absurd lows. The tag-alongers wouldn’t leave until many of their friends left since their original motivation to play the game was more focused on their friends. However, once a big part of the Pokémon dreamers left, the tag-alongers left the game quickly, too, as their thresholds were already higher. Who remains, then? The people still playing Pokémon Go are primarily hard-core players from the Pokémon dreamers category whose threshold never increased that much from their extreme lows. They still find the game fun and are the players who will eventually be the very best like no one ever was.
Source: http://variety.com/2016/digital/news/pokemon-go-usage-decline-1201896904/