Pokemon Go is growing again. Here are 3 product lessons we can learn

It was a Sunday afternoon in the Bay Area, and I was drawn outside by the warm weather to nearby Burgess Park. Surrounded by basketball courts, soccer fields, a swimming pool, and a skate park, the choice of what to do was obvious: stare intently at my phone.

And I wasn’t the only one. There were hundreds of people like me focused solely on a more interesting virtual world: the world of Pokemon Go.

But isn’t Pokemon Go yesterday’s news? Sure, it may have been popular at one point, but no one actually still plays it right?

It turns out that not only is Pokemon Go doing well, it may be doing better than ever.

Pikachu? Try Pika-cha-ching

The hit mobile game was launched over two years ago on July 5, 2016. It quickly became the number one overall mobile app on both iOS and Android and was the most downloaded App Store app ever. Within its first two weeks, Pokemon Go would also capture the crown of largest mobile game ever in the US with more than 20 million daily active users.

But like other cultural fads, the popularity of Pokemon Go did eventually wane. From a peak of hundreds of millions of monthly players, the user base shrank steadily, eventually hitting 65 million users by April 2017. But that’s also when the game began to prove it’s not like other cultural fads. Those 65 million users stuck around, continuing to spend significant time and money on the game.

And then, something even more unusual happened: Pokemon Go began growing in popularity again.

For its one year anniversary in July 2017, Niantic held its first ever organized event in Chicago and sold out the 20,000 available tickets in minutes. By May 2018, Pokemon Go had more users (147 million) than any month since its launch, and revenues for that month reached US$104 million, up 174 percent from the previous year.

Pokemon Go’s success has been nothing short of spectacular. Even more so when you factor in a little secret about it: the game itself is actually boring.

What is Pokemon Go exactly?

Because Pokemon Go isn’t really a game. It’s a collectible.