Ten years ago this week, a group of former Google engineers launched a mobile game with an unusual premise: Instead of keeping players glued to their phone screens, Pokémon Go turned the entire world into a playground by overlaying gameplay on real-world maps and locations, and rewarding people who walk the extra mile.
“Our vision [was to] inspire people to explore the world together by making Pokémon feel real in the real world,” says Ed Wu, who has been part of the Pokémon Go team from day one. Wu is now president of games at Scopely, which acquired Pokémon Go and a handful of related titles for $3.5 billion last year.
Pokémon Go’s take on mobile gaming turned it into a surprise hit, surpassing 500 million downloads two months after launch. Even more impressive than that initial success has been Pokémon Go’s immense staying power: A decade later, tens of millions of players still hunt for Pokémon every month.
Daily playtime is up 10% year over year, according to Scopely, which claims the game generated more than $1 billion in revenue in 2024 alone. Since launch, the game is estimated to have topped $9 billion in revenue on Apple’s and Google’s app stores, making it the fifth-most-lucrative mobile game of all time.
Now Wu’s team is thinking about ways to take real-world gameplay to the next level and challenge people to venture even farther into the outdoors. “I’m a huge fan of our national parks,” he says. “I think it’s fantastic that a lot of them don’t have cell service. But to be able to open up the game just for a minute when you reach some kind of peak, I think that’s pretty exciting.”
From a fake video to a real game
In the beginning, Pokémon Go was little more than a joke: Back in 2014, Google released an April Fool’s video that claimed the company was looking for people to scour treacherous mountains, rough seas, and faraway savannas to hunt for Pokémon. Players supposedly had a day to capture all the cute monsters, and the winner was promised a job at Google as the company’s new “Pokémon Master.”
The challenge was clearly fake. Inside Google, however, it struck a chord with an R&D team known as Niantic Labs that had been working on a location-based mobile game called Ingress. Much like Pokémon Go later would, Ingress challenged players to battle with each other in real-world locations in their neighborhoods. And with the April Fool’s video quickly going viral, the Niantic team was wondering: What if the fake challenge became a real game?
After receiving buy-in from Google’s leadership and the Pokémon Co., the Niantic team began building Pokémon Go with some of the same geodata that powered Ingress. The resulting game had Pokémon appear in the wild across people’s neighborhoods, as visualized on a digital map shown in the game. Players could capture these monsters by visiting specific locations and throwing digital Poké Balls at them on their phone screens. Visiting specific points of interest allowed players to power up on Poké Balls, among other things.
While Ingress had always been a bit of a niche hit, Pokémon Go quickly captured the imagination of the masses. Over the past decade, it has attracted more than 800 million players, which altogether have walked upwards of 60 billion miles since the game’s launch. Live events, like the Pokémon Go Fest that’s happening July 11 and 12, have attracted millions of attendees (Niantic sold 1 million-plus tickets for the 2024 Pokémon Go Fest alone).
Ed Wu’s own parents have been enthusiastic Pokémon Go players since day one. They’ve also helped Wu understand how impactful anchoring gameplay in the real world can be. “My dad has type 2 adult-onset diabetes,” Wu says. “His blood sugar was all over the place before this game came out. Since he started playing a decade ago, he got it completely under control because he’s walking every day.”
Some painful misses and a new surprise hit
Wu’s team faced its own challenges along the way. Encouraged by Pokémon Go’s success, they tried for years to apply similar game mechanics to other well-known franchises. Most of these attempts failed. Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, a Pokémon Go-like game developed in partnership with Warner Bros., shut down after 2 1/2 years in early 2022.
An NBA game was shuttered half a year after its release the following year. Niantic also canceled multiple unreleased games, including a Marvel’s Avengers title, when it shut down its Los Angeles game studio and laid off 230 employees in summer 2023. “Game making is never easy,” Wu says. “That’s like rule number one.”
In retrospect, Wu also concedes that Niantic missed the mark on some of those titles. “You can’t just copy Pokémon Go,” he says. “You got to [be] thoughtful about what you are doing to inspire people to explore the world. There [needs to be] something that clicks about the world that you’re trying to create in people’s imagination.”
That’s not to say Pokémon Go has to remain a one-hit wonder forever. Alongside the hit game, Scopely also acquired Monster Hunters and Pikmin Bloom, two titles that have shown success in putting their own spin on mobile gaming anchored in the real world.
Pikmin Bloom in particular may have the potential to become another surprise hit: The game, which features a more cozy, nature-centric vibe than Pokémon Go, has seen its daily average users increase by nearly 80% from April 2025 to April 2026, according to Scopely, and has been topping the app stores in Asia repeatedly this year.
“Once people start playing Pikmin Bloom, they don’t stop,” Wu says. “It [might] be one of the most retentive games in the entire mobile industry.”
Next up for Pokémon Go: cellular satellite connectivity?
Another challenge for Niantic was that the company always had ambitions beyond gaming, with plans to monetize its geospatial technology for augmented reality and other cutting-edge applications. At one point, Niantic even developed its own prototype AR glasses in partnership with Qualcomm.
Wu still likes the idea of eventually taking the game beyond phone screens, but he has reservations about the current state of augmented reality glasses. “I don’t think the hardware is necessarily there yet,” he says.
Scopely’s acquisition of Pokémon Go put an end to that tension between Niantic’s gaming and technology ambitions. The assets that weren’t part of the deal are now owned by Niantic Spatial, a new company that aims to map the world in 3D and license its geospatial data to robotics and AI companies. (Pokémon Go no longer shares any data with Niantic Spatial.)
Wu’s team, on the other hand, which rebranded to Scopely Explore this week, is squarely focused on gaming, and wants Pokémon Go to thrive for another decade. Asked what innovations could be next for the game, Wu points to satellite connectivity as a possible way to unlock the final frontier, whether that’s in a national park or another area without traditional cellphone coverage.
“Pushing folks to explore, and to feel like this game is a meaningful reward when they get all the way out there,” he says, “that’s really exciting.”
