I’ve been a bit quiet in the last two weeks. Most of my time has been spent recovering from something akin to tennis elbow. My right arm has been essentially useless for two weeks, and I use my right hand for everything except walking. I spent most of my recovery time sifting through my news feed, keeping up with gaming news. Earlier this week, one news story jumped out at me. From GamesRadar: “How do I catch Ditto in Pokemon Go? All your questions answered.”
It took me a second to fully digest the headline, and then I sat puzzled. Pokemon GO is still a thing?
I hadn’t thought of the mobile game in a while. After almost two months of looting numerous Pokestops, building up my Pokedex, and finally taking out a gym, I burnt out spectacularly. The game became boring, so I uninstalled it and never looked back. It was out of sight, and therefore went out of mind.
The gaming public, however, is not done with it yet. Sales data from Think Gaming shows that Pokemon GO is still the fifth highest grossing mobile game in the world. Think Games estimates that Niantic’s title rakes in $712,811 a day. That number is a far cry from the estimated $2 million daily the game raked in during its recent Halloween event, but it’s not chump change.
“Wait…Pokemon GO had a Halloween event?” I told myself. “I didn’t even know enough people cared to notice a Halloween event for it!”
Shows how much I know.
Turns out, the Games Radar piece about finding Ditto wasn’t the only news about Pokemon GO to come out recently. Niantic coincided Ditto’s arrival with better news: a new tracking system that actually works. Long a point of contention with hardcore fans, the game’s tracking system was notoriously buggy upon launch and was disabled while Niantic worked to fix it. The fix is in, just in time for a Thanksgiving weekend bonus XP event.
So there’s a Thanksgiving event, too? Hot damn!
The tracking fix actually looks nice, too. Instead of just an image of the nearby Pokemon and a number of footsteps that denote how far it is, the new Nearby feature shows what Pokestop the specified Pokemon is near. That helps much more when hunting for the pesky critters.
The new Nearby feature isn’t available in all areas. Apparently, folks outside of high-density cities still get the old footsteps system, but it at least works as originally intended.
The arrival of Ditto in Pokemon GO is big news in and of itself. One of six Pokemon to yet make an appearance as of my last play session, Ditto started appearing as disguised Ratattas and Pidgeys. That means that catching the most common Pokemon can now actually be a good thing.
So it turns out Pokemon GO still is a thing. It may not be the end-all, be-all monster that it was in July, but it’s still going strong. People still play it and enjoy it; the game still sees an estimated 38,582 daily installs.
I’m not in any rush to reinstall the game. When I burn out, I usually burn out for good. But who knows? Maybe they’ll announce a new Christmas event where every time you visit a gym you can throw snowballs at the Pokemon there. That might interest me enough to give it another try.
