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Without a doubt, Pokémon GO is the most successful app to hit the Google Play Store this year. It might even be one of the most popular apps of all time. To further illustrate how massive the game has become, its creator, Niantic, has put things into a different perspective– by counting the number of kilometers its players has walked while playing the game.
On a post published earlier today, Niantic shared that the Pokémon GO community has walked over 8.7 billion kilometers. The number was obtained December 7th and gathered from its 25 million users throughout the world. To further explain how vast this distance is, Niantic released a video to supply its figures. On the video, Niantic shares that Pokémon GO players have collectively made 200,000 trips around the Earth. If it was possible, walking to Neptune would reach up to 4.6 billion kilometers and 7.2 billion kilometers to walk to Pluto. Looking back to NASA’s New Horizons probe, it took them nine years to reach Pluto as they traveled 30,000 miles per hour.
In addition to the number of kilometers covered by the players, Niantic released that Trainers have been able to catch over 88 billion Pokémon ever since the game launched in July. This means that there are 533 million Pokémon being caught by players throughout the world on a daily basis. Back in September, Niantic announced that its Trainers had walked a total of 4.6 billion kilometers. The latest number that was gathered earlier this month proves that people are still playing and enjoying Pokémon GO, despite reports that the game has died down. When Pokémon GO launched in July, it captured the attention of the public who were keen to drop everything they were doing and start hunting down Pokémon, but as the months went on, the app has seen a continuous drop with its number of active users. A Niantic representative spoke to the media and stated that as of November 2016, the game has been downloaded over 600 million times. While this is an impressive achievement for the company, they did not specify daily usage numbers. Niantic, is also not closing any doors as they have released new baby Pokémon for players to hunt down.