Pokemon Go fever may as yet prove to be a fad, but Niantic’s Nintendo-branded reskin of its augmented reality game Ingress has already surpassed Tinder, Twitter, and every mobile game app to become the most popular mobile game in the U.S. — of all time.
This data comes to us via SurveyMonkey, which late yesterday released a new analytics report clocking United States daily active users at 21 million. Twenty-one million people! For context, the USA as a whole has a population of around 319 million, meaning that within a week of launch, one in about every 15 people anywhere in the country has signed up for this game.
This is not to say Pokemon Go is a record-breaker everywhere, mind. Candy Crush, at its height, boasted around 93 million daily active users globally. Meanwhile, the SurveyMonkey data is focused on U.S. metrics alone, and while Pokemon Go is also live (and incredibly popular) in several other countries at the moment, including Germany, Australia, and (as of today) the United Kingdom, there are many more countries where it hasn’t yet officially launched, like Canada and South Korea. This means we’re a ways away from having a comprehensive picture of how the game is faring on an international scale.
It also pays to remember that Pokemon Go needs to sustain high user activity over the long term to be deemed actually successful for Nintendo. That being said, it’s already blown past most people’s projections — including developer Niantic’s, if the extant server problems are any indication — so fad or not, the game’s already left its mark on mobile game history.
(h/t SurveyMonkey.)
