A year in, millions still play Pokémon Go (and will likely attend its festival)

You can't even escape Pokémon Go at your local craft beer bottle store. (credit: Nathan Mattise)

Just one year ago, Pokémon Go was let loose upon the hapless denizens of Earth. The augmented reality game took gamers by storm by challenging players to catch pokémon IRL. Within just a few days, the title captured an absolutely insane 45 million daily users. And by the end of that first month in July 2016, Pokémon Go had simultaneously become the fastest growing, most popular, and most lucrative mobile game of all time.

That level of craze eventually died down, of course. Within a couple of months, the number of daily users had sunk to about 30 million. By the end of the year, that figure was closer to just five million. And then... the haemorrhaging stopped. Today, Pokémon Go continues to have around five million daily users and 65 million monthly active users, according to game developer Niantic. It's still one of the most popular mobile games in the world and still generating vast amounts of money.

Over its first year, Pokémon Go garnered as many headlines for offline activities as it did for the popular gameplay itself. The gaming community became so smitten it offered the title a Dreamcast port and the "Twitch Plays" treatment. And following a string of Pokemon Go-adjacent crime reports, the game's privacy situation caught the attention of everyone from US Senator Al Franken to filmmaker-turned-surveillance advocate Oliver Stone.

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