Pocket Monsters of Carbon County

by Mike Armstrong

“My kids love it,” Hanna Marshal Ted Kranenbery Jr said. “It is pretty neat to see the places that they can go in Hanna.”

Kranenberg popped out his phone and pulled up the game and showed that the Hanna Recreation Center was place his kids needed to go find a Pokemon that was valuable. There were several other street corners and a few places of business highlighted with a Pokemon Stop.

Pokemon Go is a 2016 augmented reality (AR) mobile game developed and published by Niantic Labs in collaboration with Nintendo. It uses mobile devices with GPS to locate, capture, train, and battle virtual creatures, called Pokemon, which appear as if they are in the player’s real world location. The game is free to play. 

The game launched with around 150 species of Pokemon, which had increased to around 700 by 2021.

Dana Davis, Saratoga Museum Director, has been playing Pokemon for 20 years when her six year old daughter wanted to play.

“As a mother, I wanted to know exactly what was going on and make sure it was appropriated, so I played along with her,” Davis said. “With Pokemon Go, my nephew wanted to play so I have the game because of him.”

Davis said the game can be for ages six to as old as you want. She said it is good exercise because you have to often walk to get your Pokemon objective.

 The game is credited with popularizing location-based and AR technology, promoting physical activity, and helping local businesses grow due to increased foot traffic because the Pokemon’s goals or Pokemon stops are often found in these places.

“The whole purpose is catch Pokemons and there all sort of Pokemons to capture,” Davis said. “The different Pokemons can battle each other, so obviously a fire Pokeman will beat a lot of other Pokemans, but then a water Pokemon can beat a fire. There is a bank that you put all your Pokemons into and the idea is to fill it up with all the Pokemons.”

Davis said there are battles for Pokemons by the avatars. 

“It is actually very user friendly to get started,” Davis said. “Besides being user friendly, it is fun.”

After establishing a game account, players create and customize their own avatars. Once created, an avatar is displayed on a map based on the player’s geographical location. Features on the map include ‘Poke Stops’ and ‘Pokemon Gyms’. These Poke Stops can be equipped with items called ‘Lure Modules’, which attract additional wild, and occasionally rare, Pokemon. Gyms serve as battle locations for team-based king of the hill matches. Poke Stops and Gyms are typically located at places of interest. Businesses not only benefit, but so do monuments and other scenic attractions. The idea is to get the players exploring their community and do it by walking.

“They make it easy to go a little distance, maybe five kilometers or so, and then there is a reason to stop,” Davis said. “Now you can battle with other players from all over the world.”

As players move within their real world surroundings, their avatars move within the game’s map. Different Pokemon species reside in different areas of the world. For example, the water type Pokemon Davis mentioned are generally found near water. When a player encounters a Pokemon, it may be viewed either in AR mode or with a live rendered, generic background. If the player flees, the Pokemon will face the spot it was last seen. AR mode uses the camera and gyroscope on the player’s mobile device to display an image of a Pokemon as though it were in the real world. Players can take screenshots of the Pokemon they encounter either with or without the AR mode activated.

The popularity of this game cannot be understated. In late July of 2016—when Pokemon Go was launched­within two days of release, it was installed on more than five percent of Android devices in the United States, according to Similar Web, According to Sensor Tower, the game was downloaded more than 10 million times within a week of release, becoming the fastest such app to do so, and reached 15 million global downloads by July 13. According to Survey Monkey the game became the most active mobile game in the United States ever with 21 million active users on July 12. By July 31, the game exceeded 100 million downloads worldwide, according to App Annie and Sensor Tower. On August 8, Pokemon reached the milestone of over 100 million downloads on Google Play after 33 days on the market. Through in-game purchases, the game generated more than $160 million by the end of July 2016, with App Annie reporting Pokemon Go had generated around $10 million in revenue every day that month. Pokemon Go reached the milestone of $600 million in revenue after only 90 days on the market, becoming the fastest mobile game ever to do so. Besides in-game purchases, partnerships with retail chains like Starbucks, McDonald’s, Sprint, paid Niantic Labs for foot traffic on-demand of the retail shops.

Between 2016 and now, Pokemon did wane in popularity, especially during the time Covid-19 started to effect the nation and world. Players stopped going to places that were enclosed, if they were even open.

Niantic Labs implemented new features which allowed players to play the game from inside their homes, and this was credited with increasing its player base throughout the year despite the restrictions. Despite a brief drop early in the pandemic, the number of monthly active users of the game rose by 45 percent between January and August 2020, and the game’s revenue in 2020 was the highest in its history, exceeding even its 2016 revenue. The game generated more than $1 billion of revenue in the first 10 months of 2020 according to Sensor Tower, and it was the top grossing mobile game of December 2020. Pokémon Go was one of the top five highest-grossing games of 2020 with an annual revenue of $1.92 billion according to Super Data Research, bringing the game’s cumulative revenue to $6.46 billion by 2020. The game generated a further $641.6 million in the first half of 2021.

Carbon County has not been left behind in this world wide craze as demonstrated by Kranenberg’s children and Davis have proved. Pokemon Go can be found throughout the county.

“I think it brings families together and it is again focusing on the physical activity of getting people out of their houses,” Davis said. “As someone who has seen the craze of Pokemon and Pokemon Go when it first started, I am glad it is being appreciated again. Because the bottom line, it is just fun to play no matter what age you are.”