Pokémon GO Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Noah Mc, Gaming | Last updated: September 23, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
Headline statistic: According to Axis Intelligence Research, Pokémon GO live events generated $946.7 million in documented local economic impact across 10 studied host cities between 2022 and early 2025, including $237.2 million in tax revenue, from 556,103 attendees. That is roughly $1,702 of host-city economic activity per attendee, a figure no publisher has tallied until now.
Quick Answer
Pokémon GO has reached 800 million+ lifetime players and generated more than $1 billion in revenue in 2025, according to Scopely’s 10th-anniversary release (July 10, 2026). Trainers average 45 minutes of daily play, up from 40 minutes in March 2025. Axis Intelligence Research calculates a pooled Trainer Economic Yield (TEY) of $1,702 per live-event attendee.
Key Findings
- Pokémon GO passed 800 million lifetime players and 1 trillion Pokémon caught as of July 2026, per Scopely.
- Pokémon GO earned more than $1 billion in 2025, its first full year under Scopely ownership after the $3.5 billion Niantic deal closed on May 29, 2025.
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, average daily playtime rose 12.5% between March 2025 and July 2026, from 40 to 45 minutes, per Scopely disclosures.
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, Pokémon GO live events produced $946.7 million in documented local economic impact across 10 host cities from 2022 to February 2025.
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, Pokémon GO Tour: Unova in Los Angeles posted the highest Trainer Economic Yield of any studied event: $2,140 per attendee.
How Many People Play Pokémon GO in 2026?
Ten years in, the player base question has a split answer: the lifetime reach is enormous, and the active core is smaller but unusually loyal. Here is every player metric the operator has actually disclosed, with its date.
| Metric | Value | As of | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lifetime players | 800 million+ | Jul 10, 2026 | Scopely |
| Unique players in 2024 | 100 million+ | 2024 | Scopely |
| Weekly active players | 20 million+ | Mar 12, 2025 | Scopely |
| Niantic games portfolio MAU (all titles) | 30 million+ | Mar 12, 2025 | Scopely |
| Share of players returning 7 days a week | ~50% | Mar 12, 2025 | Scopely |
| Average daily playtime | 40 min → 45 min | Mar 2025 → Jul 2026 | Scopely |
Pokémon GO player count: annual vs weekly
Scopely’s acquisition announcement put Pokémon GO at 100 million+ unique players in 2024 and 20 million+ weekly active players. According to Axis Intelligence Research, that means about 20% of the annual player base shows up in any given week (20M ÷ 100M). And since roughly half of players return seven days a week, Axis Intelligence Research estimates that around 10 million Trainers play every single day of the week (0.5 × 20M). Treat that as an estimate: Scopely did not specify the denominator for “half of all players.”
Is Pokémon GO still popular? The playtime signal
Noah Mc: Forget the download chart. The number that tells you a live-service game is healthy is time-in-app, and Pokémon GO’s went up. Forty minutes a day in March 2025, 45 minutes in July 2026. Most ten-year-old mobile games are fighting session decay by now. This one is adding five minutes per player per day while running a free global GO Fest. That’s not a nostalgia bump. That’s a live-ops calendar working.
Where is Pokémon GO played?
Scopely’s March 2025 release said the game reaches players in 190+ countries and regions; its July 2026 release said 150+. Both are minimums from the same company. We publish them side by side rather than pick one, and the CSV flags the pair as a discrepancy.
How Much Money Does Pokémon GO Make?
Pokémon GO revenue 2025
Pokémon GO generated more than $1 billion in revenue in 2025, per Scopely’s July 2026 anniversary release. That is the first calendar year reported largely under Scopely, which closed the Niantic games acquisition on May 29, 2025.
For 2024, the only operator-stated revenue covers the full Niantic games portfolio: more than $1 billion across Pokémon GO, Pikmin Bloom, and Monster Hunter Now, with Scopely footnoting an in-app-purchase estimate basis. Pokémon GO is the bulk of that portfolio, but no split was disclosed.
Why we don’t publish a revenue-per-player figure for 2024
It is tempting to divide $1 billion by 100 million players and announce “$10 per player.” Axis Intelligence Research declined that calculation: the revenue figure covers three games while the player figure covers one. The row ships in our CSV marked retracted, with the reasoning, so nobody can quietly lift it.
Pokémon GO launch records (2016)
| Record | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue in first month | $206.5 million | Guinness World Records |
| Downloads in first month | 130 million | Guinness World Records |
| Days to gross $100 million | 20 | Guinness World Records |
| Countries topping download charts simultaneously | 70 | Guinness World Records |
| Countries topping grossing charts simultaneously | 55 | Guinness World Records |
According to Axis Intelligence Research, the launch month worked out to roughly $1.59 of revenue per download ($206.5M ÷ 130M). A decade later the game is monetizing a much smaller active audience at a far deeper level, which is the whole live-service playbook in one comparison.
Who Owns Pokémon GO? The $3.5 Billion Scopely Deal
| Deal term | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Deal value | $3.5 billion | Scopely |
| Announced | March 12, 2025 | Scopely |
| Closed | May 29, 2025 | Scopely |
| Niantic gamemakers joining Scopely | 400+ | Scopely |
| Titles included | Pokémon GO, Pikmin Bloom, Monster Hunter Now, plus Campfire and Wayfarer | Scopely |
Scopely acquired Niantic’s games business; Niantic’s technology platform spun out as Niantic Spatial. The deal priced the whole portfolio at 3.5x its stated 2024 revenue, on a portfolio that has kept Pokémon GO a top 10 mobile game every year since 2016.
Noah Mc: The buyer here runs Monopoly Go, a game built on event cadence. What they paid for wasn’t a map or an AR engine. It was a player base that already walks to a park on a Saturday because the calendar tells them to. The 2025 number clearing $1 billion again says the handoff didn’t break that habit.
The Axis Trainer Economic Yield (TEY): What Pokémon GO Is Worth to a Host City
Here is the part nobody else in gaming publishes. Pokémon GO is the only mobile game that routinely commissions independent economic impact studies of its events. The operator released those studies one city at a time, over four years, in different formats. Axis Intelligence Research assembled all of them into a single dataset and built one comparable number.
Trainer Economic Yield (TEY) = total local economic impact reported for an event ÷ attendees reported for that event.
TEY answers the question a tourism board or city council actually asks: how much economic activity does each Trainer bring through the gate? Inputs come exclusively from the operator-published studies from Niantic 2022, Niantic 2023, Niantic 2024, and Scopely 2025.
Pokémon GO Fest economic impact by year
| Series | Local economic impact | Tax revenue | Attendees | TEY (Axis) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GO Fest 2022 (Berlin, Seattle, Sapporo) | $309M | $79.6M | 150,000 | $2,060 | Niantic |
| GO Fest 2023 (New York, London, Osaka) | $323M | $73.8M | 194,000 | $1,665 | Niantic |
| GO Fest 2024 (New York, Madrid, Sendai) | $212M* | $61M | 164,103 | $1,292 | Niantic |
| GO Tour: Unova, Los Angeles (Feb 2025) | $102.7M | $22.8M | 48,000 | $2,140 | Scopely |
| Total, 10 host cities | $946.7M | $237.2M | 556,103 | $1,702 pooled | Axis calculation |
*2024 figures are the sum of the three city results Niantic published ($126M + $38M + $48M); Niantic’s headline rounds the series to “+$200 million.” Attendance is in-park players (68,703 + 27,400 + 68,000).
Trainer Economic Yield ranking by host city
| Rank | Event | TEY | Avg visitor spend | Spend Conversion Ratio (Axis) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Los Angeles, GO Tour 2025 | $2,140 | $929 | 2.30x | Scopely |
| 2 | New York City, GO Fest 2023 | $1,893 | $783 | n/a | Niantic |
| 3 | New York City, GO Fest 2024 | $1,834 | $795 | 2.31x | Niantic |
| 4 | Madrid, GO Fest 2024 | $1,387 | $669 | 2.07x | Niantic |
| 5 | Sendai, GO Fest 2024 | $706 | $407 | 1.73x | Niantic |
NYC 2023 uses tickets sold (74,000) as its denominator, the only attendance figure Niantic released for that event, so we leave its conversion ratio blank.
According to Axis Intelligence Research, the Spend Conversion Ratio (TEY ÷ average visitor spend) shows how far each dollar a Trainer spends travels through the local economy once indirect and induced effects are counted. US events convert at about 2.3x. Sendai converts at 1.73x, and with 91% of its visitors coming from elsewhere in Japan, most trips were domestic and shorter.
Noah Mc: Sendai is the stat that surprises people. Same crowd size as New York in 2024, 68,000 in the park, and less than 40% of the yield. The Trainers showed up, they walked 28 km each, they caught 10 million Pokémon. They just didn’t book three hotel nights and a flight. For a city deciding whether to bid, TEY says the draw isn’t the crowd. It’s how far the crowd traveled.
Is Pokémon GO Fest bigger than a Super Bowl?
Niantic’s 2022 study put the three-city total of $309 million “on a par” with its cited range for Super Bowl LVI in Los Angeles County ($234 million to $477 million). That comparison is the operator’s, made in its own release, and the ranges come from different studies with different methods. What holds up without the comparison: in the 2024 series, the tax take alone ran 28.8% of total impact ($61M ÷ $212M), according to Axis Intelligence Research, the highest share of any series studied.
Pokémon GO Fest 2026 attendance
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Players taking part in GO Fest 2026 (Tokyo, Chicago, Copenhagen) | 3 million+ | Scopely |
| In-person events sold out | 3 of 3 (first time in the three-city format) | Scopely |
| Pokémon caught in Copenhagen during its event | 78 million+ | Scopely |
| GO Fest tickets sold, 2024 | 2 million | Scopely |
| Largest single live raid, Times Square, July 9, 2026 | 1,000+ players | Scopely |
The 2024 figure counts tickets and the 2026 figure counts participants, and GO Fest 2026: Global was free for the first time. We do not compute growth between them. No economic impact studies for GO Fest 2025 (Osaka, Jersey City, Paris) had been published as of this update, even though Scopely said in November 2025 that they would follow.
How many players attend a GO Fest city, not just the park?
Niantic’s 2024 release says over 1.2 million Trainers played citywide across the three hosts. Its own city breakdowns (474,900 New York, 192,000 Madrid, 379,000 Sendai) add up to 1,045,900. We publish both numbers and flag the gap; we do not reconcile it.
Pokémon GO Engagement Statistics: Distance, Catches, Raids
| Lifetime metric | Value | As of | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pokémon caught | 1 trillion+ | Jul 2026 | Scopely |
| Distance explored | 100 billion+ km | Jul 2026 | Scopely |
| Raid battles completed | 10 billion+ | Jul 2026 | Scopely |
| Live event cities | 60+ in 25+ countries and regions | Jul 2026 | Scopely |
| Campfire meetup check-ins (2024) | 6 million+ | 2024 | Scopely |
| Wayspot locations added since 2019 | 11.5 million+ | Mar 2025 | Scopely |
According to Axis Intelligence Research, 1 trillion catches across 800 million lifetime players works out to about 1,250 Pokémon per player ever. Both inputs are floors, so read it as an order of magnitude.
One disclosure pair does not add up, and we say so. In March 2025, Scopely cited 30 billion miles explored (about 48.3 billion km). In July 2026, it cited 100 billion+ km. Taken literally, Trainers would have walked about 52 billion km in 16 months, more than in the previous nine years combined. The two figures almost certainly use different counting bases, so Axis Intelligence Research declined to publish a growth rate. The retracted row sits in the CSV.
Pokémon GO distance walked at live events
| Event | Avg distance per Trainer | Source |
|---|---|---|
| GO Fest 2022 (series avg) | 10.2 km | Niantic |
| GO Fest 2024 (series avg) | 18.3 km | Niantic |
| Sendai 2024 | 28 km | Niantic |
| Los Angeles GO Tour 2025 | 25 km | Scopely |
Does Pokémon GO Make People Walk More? What the Research Says
Two peer-reviewed studies measured it, and they agree on direction while disagreeing on durability.
The BMJ study by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health researchers (n=1,182 US adults aged 18 to 35, using iPhone step data) found players added 955 daily steps in the first week from a baseline of 4,256, but the effect faded and was no longer observed after six weeks.
The JMIR study of 32,000 wearable users found engaged players added 1,473 steps a day over 30 days, more than 25% above prior activity, and estimated the game added 144 billion steps to US physical activity in the study window.
Noah Mc: Both studies are from 2016, the launch spike. What they couldn’t measure is the thing the live-event data now shows: a game that schedules the walking. The 2016 effect faded in six weeks because the novelty did. In 2024, the average GO Fest Trainer walked 18.3 km in a weekend because the event design demanded it.
Methodology
Collection. Axis Intelligence Research fetched every figure on September 23, 2026 from operator releases (Scopely, Niantic), Guinness World Records, and two peer-reviewed journals (BMJ via PubMed Central, JMIR). No figure comes from app-intelligence aggregators or third-party statistics compilers. Operator figures are company-reported and labeled as such.
Trainer Economic Yield (TEY). TEY = local economic impact ÷ event attendees, using only studies that report both values for the same event. Impact figures are total effects (direct, indirect, induced, including tax) as reported in the operator-commissioned studies, which used participant surveys and local economic modeling. Currency conversions (EUR, JPY) are Niantic’s own.
Spend Conversion Ratio. TEY ÷ reported average visitor spend. It approximates the local multiplier. Attendee and visitor bases differ slightly across studies, so we present it as an Axis estimate.
Scope. Attendance denominators vary by event (in-park players, attendees, tickets sold), noted per row. All economic impact studies were commissioned by the operator. 2022 city-level figures report spending rather than total impact and are excluded from the city ranking. Declined calculations and unresolved source discrepancies are published in the CSV with data_type set to retracted or discrepancy.
About This Dataset
The Pokémon GO Statistics 2026 dataset contains 115 rows covering players, engagement, revenue, the Scopely acquisition, launch records, live-event economics for 10 host cities (2022 to 2025), and physical-activity research. Every row carries source organization, document, URL, retrieval date, primary-source flag, and calculation method.
- Format: CSV, UTF-8, one header row, tidy long format
- License: CC BY 4.0
- Mirrors: Hugging Face, Kaggle, GitHub (Axis Intelligence Research)
Cite This Page
APA: Axis Intelligence Research. (2026). Pokémon GO statistics 2026: Players, revenue, and the $946.7M live-event economy. Axis Intelligence. https://axis-intelligence.com/pokemon-go-statistics/
MLA: Axis Intelligence Research. “Pokémon GO Statistics 2026: Players, Revenue, and the $946.7M Live-Event Economy.” Axis Intelligence, 23 Sept. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/pokemon-go-statistics/.
Chicago: Axis Intelligence Research. “Pokémon GO Statistics 2026: Players, Revenue, and the $946.7M Live-Event Economy.” Axis Intelligence, September 23, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/pokemon-go-statistics/.
Related Gaming Data
Pokémon’s console side is moving just as fast: Pokémon Pokopia and the FireRed and LeafGreen remakes both appear in our Nintendo Switch 2 statistics. For how Pokémon GO’s weekly core compares with other live-service platforms, see Roblox statistics and our Fortnite statistics, where engagement is moving the opposite way. Revenue durability across a decade is also tracked in our GTA 5 statistics, and platform context sits in Xbox statistics and PC gaming statistics. All datasets live on the Axis statistics hub.
Pokémon GO Questions Trainers, Analysts, and Host Cities Ask
How many people actively play Pokémon GO each week?
Pokémon GO had more than 20 million weekly active players as of March 2025, according to Scopely. Axis Intelligence Research estimates about 10 million of them play all seven days of the week.
How much did Pokémon GO make in 2025?
Pokémon GO generated more than $1 billion in revenue in 2025, according to Scopely’s July 10, 2026 anniversary release. Scopely has not published an exact figure.
What is Pokémon GO’s lifetime player count at 10 years?
Scopely reported 800 million+ lifetime players as of July 2026, with more than 1 trillion Pokémon caught and 10 billion+ raid battles completed.
How much is a GO Fest worth to a host city?
According to Axis Intelligence Research’s Trainer Economic Yield (TEY), each attendee generated about $1,702 in local economic activity on a pooled basis across 10 host cities from 2022 to 2025. The range runs from $706 in Sendai to $2,140 in Los Angeles.
Which Pokémon GO event had the biggest economic impact?
GO Fest 2023 in New York City posted the largest single-city impact in the operator’s studies: $140.1 million, including $28.1 million in tax revenue, per Niantic.
Did the Scopely acquisition hurt Pokémon GO?
The operator data points the other way. Pokémon GO cleared $1 billion in 2025 revenue, average daily playtime rose from 40 to 45 minutes, and all three GO Fest 2026 in-person events sold out for the first time in the three-city format.
Do Pokémon GO players really walk more?
Yes, at least short term. A 2016 BMJ study found players added 955 steps a day in their first week, fading by week six. A JMIR study found engaged players added 1,473 steps a day over 30 days.
When will GO Fest 2025 economic impact data be released?
Scopely said in November 2025 that studies for Osaka, Jersey City, and Paris would follow. None had been published as of September 23, 2026. This page will add them when released.