Niantic’s Pokemon GO was initially released on the 6th of July where it saw a limited launch before eventually expanding to pretty much the entire world. It has been something of both a cultural and technological hit in the sense that it showed developers and consumers the possibilities of augmented reality (AR) based gaming.
That being said, to show how popular the game has been since its launch, Niantic has posted some pretty interesting statistics about the game which are pretty amazing to say the least. Since the game does involve a bit of walking to discover and capture Pokemon, it has been revealed that as of the 7th of December, players have walked a total of 8.7 billion kilometers, and have caught 88 billion Pokemon to date.
According to Niantic’s calculations, 8.7 billion kilometers is essentially 200,000 trips around the Earth, and a commercial jetliner would take more than 1,000 years to cover the same distance. Also at 88 billion Pokemon being caught, it averages out to about 533 million Pokemon a day. Given that Niantic has also recently released an update that will introduce second-gen Pokemon to the game, we can only imagine that those numbers will only increase, and that distance will become even greater over time.
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