Pokémon GO's Daily Active User Count Has Dropped By Over 80% Since Launch

When Pokemon GO originally launched last July, it was an immediate cultural phenomenon. It was such a cultural phenomenon, in fact, that even places like CNN stopped talking about the upcoming election long enough to write getting started guides for the game. It was at the top of both the App Store and Google Play's top free app and top grossing charts for months.

Enthusiasm quickly waned, however, as many players discovered that the game simply had no depth. You ran around the real world, caught Pokémon, caught more Pokémon to level up the Pokémon that you had already caught, fought in gyms, rinse and repeat. Given the game's capture mechanics, which consisted entirely of flicking Pokéballs at Pokémon and attempting to hit within a predetermined circle for the best capture chance, the core gameplay loop got dull fairly fast. Players wanted features that had long since become staples of the series, such as player battles and trading.

Right now, the game is sitting at #65 on Google Play's top free apps chart. It's fallen fairly far, but that doesn't really quantify exactly how many people are still playing the game. Fortunately, comScore has put out a report that does quantify exactly how many people are still playing Pokémon GO.

As you can see in the image above, Pokémon GO peaked at 28.5 million daily active users right after launch before becoming stuck in a steady decline until late October. It is still in decline, but the rate of decline is much less rapid. In all, more than 80% of its daily active users have left the game and it is now sitting around 5 million daily active users. That's still nothing to scoff at, but it's a mere fraction of what it once was.

A recent article on Forbes suggests that part of the problem is that there's too much downtime between events and that the game needs quests that players can complete while there are no ongoing events. I'm not sure that this alone would have saved the game, and neither is the author for that matter, but, at this point, I'm inclined to say that just about any additional features would help.

Are you one of the five million players that are playing Pokémon GO each day? Let us know in the comments.