Someone's Gotta Ask: What Went Wrong With Pokémon Go?

It's no joke: the popularity of Pokémon Go is in rapid decline - but why?

The game launched in July and almost immediately soared in popularity, people were seriously obsessed. I was literally one of those people, glued to my phone trying to catch Pidgey number 60 of the day.

Fast forward to the middle of August, and the game had lost at least a third of its daily users. Yikes.

I haven't played Pokémon go in over a week. I think we're done here.

— ellen (@eee999) August 19, 2016

Haven't played Pokemon Go in two weeks. If this were tamagochi they'd all be dead

— Not a Hurricane (@nicole) August 13, 2016

Fast forward (a little more) to mid-September and daily revenues had fallen from $US16 million per day to $US2 million. Daily downloads also took a hit, declining from a peak of 27 million to 700,000.

Now people are trying to figure out why the game reached such a peak only to fall and crash into a burning pit of flames. (Sorry, bit dramatic there, but seriously.)

Mark Humphery-Jenner, an Associate Professor of Finance at the University of New South Wales has summed it up pretty well.

Firstly, the developers didn't introduce new game features quick enough to stop players from getting bored. There have been little to no developments in the way of new gameplay, apart from the most recent addition being in the form of hardware: a wearable Pokémon Go device.

They also removed features that were really popular, most notably, "Pokémon tracking". Even going as far as to ban third party apps from circumventing the removed feature.

Humphery-Jenner says, "companies should always know what their customers regard as essential, and should never undermine it without putting in place a clear workaround (or ideally, improvement)."

He also says that miscommunication (or perhaps, lack thereof) led to the eventual downfall of Pokémon Go. "The developers communicated only intermittently about server outages, offering very little information about why they had happened, how long the disruption was expected to last, or whether it was the work of hackers."

Maybe reading all of this has inspired you to open up the game and check up on how many steps are left on that 15 kilometre egg, or maybe not at all.

Photo: iStock