Punctuating a wild 12 months, Niantic releases a big gym overhaul patch.
Enlarge / You can't even escape Pokémon Go at your local craft beer bottle store.
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 hemorrhaging 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.
As for the game itself during these first 12 months, Niantic has rapidly added new features and tried to clamp down on cheaters in order to keep its new trainers hooked. The company has also gradually added lots of new pokémon for you to catch, of course.
Last week, Pokémon Go received its largest functional update: gyms have now been completely overhauled, including the way in which you earn pokécoins (the game's main currency). Your pokémon will now automatically bring back a coin for every 10 minutes they successfully defend a gym. You can't earn more than 50 coins through gyms per day, and a single pokémon can't earn you more than 50 coins from a gym—so you'll probably need some kind of staggered return process to maximise your coin earnings.
This latest patch also included a new "raid battle" feature, which will let you band together with other trainers to battle raid bosses at gyms. But these bosses haven't yet appeared in Pokémon Go; Niantic is probably saving them for some kind of first anniversary celebration.
And if you really need proof that Pokémon Go is still alive and kicking, Niantic is holding its first real-world event on July 22: Pokémon Go Fest in Chicago. Thousands of monster hunters will walk around Grant Park, which will contain special pokéstops and a higher-than-usual density of pokémon.
If you have yet to live out your inner Ash Ketchum, you can still download Pokémon Go for iOS or Android.
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