Southeast Asia is going mad over Pokemon Go (Infographic)

Pokemon Go has taken the world by storm – even those places where it hasn’t launched yet, like Southeast Asia.

The latest mobile game from Niantic beats several huge international events – tech or non-tech – in terms of the number of searches on Google over the month that each event happened, according to the Search Popularity Index analysis done by ecommerce startup iPrice (the SEO-driven company obviously spends a lot of time with Google data).

The index uses Pokemon Go as baseline (= 100) and shows how other events fare.

In terms of top searches, Apple’s iPhone 5 launch in September 2012 and the FIFA World Cup held in Brazil in June 2014 are the only ones comparable to the Pokemon Go craze across Southeast Asia.

The game, meanwhile, is most searched in Indonesia, followed by the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand.

(Click here for the interactive version.)

Pokemon Go blends the real and digital worlds, tasking players with exploring their neighborhoods to find creatures and treasure using their smartphone cameras.

The game was released in the US, Australia, and New Zealand earlier this month and it took a while before it rolled out in Japan – the origin of the Pokemon franchise.

It also came out in Hong Kong this week, but there’s still no word about when it’s going to be released to the rest of Asia.

That doesn’t stop people from playing, however. Gamers have managed to download and access Pokemon Go with simple hacks in countries where it’s not available.

In Indonesia, for example, a French citizen was taken into police custody after he trespassed into a military compound in search of one of the digital creatures.