If you’re a casual Pokémon GO player, you might just wonder how the game makes money, or if it ever makes money. To you, buying Pokecoins seems illogical, and the app is free to play. So, where did the money come from?
Well, the first thing you have to do is to suspend your belief, because people do buy Pokecoins—in fact, people buy many Pokecoins.
The game was only released in early July, and in a month, it has reeled in USD$250 million: go do the maths on the number of Pokecoins that were purchased. According to Think Gaming, it now brings in about USD$5 million per day.
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In other words, one in five players actually paid real money to play the game. That means you would most likely have a friend whose Pokeballs were bought with real money and not picked up from Pokestops.
Now, this is purely from Pokecoins—Pokémon GO has several other ways to make money.
The first is sponsored locations: in Japan, the nation where the first Pokémon was born, Pokémon GO works with McDonald’s to turn their 3,000 outlets into gyms, so players would be lured to the fast-food outlets for a battle of Pokemons and also a cheeseburger. The amount McDonald’s pays to the developer of Pokémon GO is undisclosed.
The second is in-app advertising: at this moment, programmatic advertisement is not seen in the game, unlike other mobile games that had gone viral. Flappy Bird itself earned USD$50,000 per day just on advertising: you can expect Pokémon GO, if it ever supports it, might just crash the ad network’s server.
Moneynation.com projects that it will earn well over USD$16 billion just on advertisement: that’s more than USD$1 billion a month, or over USD$30 million per day.
In total? If it continues earning over USD$5 million per day just on Pokecoins and USD$30 million per day on in-app advertisements, that’s over USD$12 billion dollars a year.
That’s more than Singapore GDP in 1980. Pokémon GO is really serious business.
Featured Image: M. Primakov / Shutterstock.com
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This article was first published on goodyfeed.com
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