Ten years ago, a mobile game did something few had managed before: it got people to put down their phones by, paradoxically, staring at them outdoors. Pokemon Go, which launched in July 2016, turned parks, sidewalks and landmarks into a shared playground almost overnight. A decade on, the game is celebrating its anniversary, with fans gathering in New York's Times Square and at events worldwide, CBS News reported.
The summer of 2016
Pokemon Go's arrival was a genuine cultural event. Built on augmented reality, the game overlaid cartoon creatures onto the real world through a phone's camera and told players to go and find them, which they did, in enormous numbers. Downloads ran into the hundreds of millions within weeks, and city streets filled with people of all ages walking, gathering and occasionally wandering somewhere they should not have. It became shorthand for a moment when the digital and physical worlds seemed, briefly, to merge, and it prompted stories both charming and cautionary, from strangers meeting at landmarks to warnings about players straying into traffic or private property.
From craze to habit
That initial frenzy could not last, and it did not. The game's audience fell sharply from its 2016 peak as the novelty wore off. What was left, though, was more durable than the craze: a committed core of players who kept going through years of new features, seasonal events and community days. The game settled into a rhythm of steady, if less spectacular, popularity, and remained a serious money-maker, generating substantial revenue year after year, long after the headlines moved on. Reported figures for its earnings vary, but by any measure Pokemon Go has been one of the most commercially successful mobile games ever made.
A change of owner
That success made it a valuable asset. In 2025, the games business of Niantic, the company that created Pokemon Go, was sold to the mobile-games firm Scopely in a deal valued at around $3.5 billion, TechCrunch reported. The sale moved the game under new management while Niantic's founder turned his attention to other uses of the mapping technology the game had helped build. Under its new owner, Pokemon Go has continued to run large anniversary events and updates, a sign that its backers still see plenty of life in it.
Why it endured
The striking thing about Pokemon Go at 10 is not that it still makes money, but that it still draws crowds willing to stand together in a public square, phones aloft, chasing the same digital quarry. In an age of solitary, algorithm-fed entertainment, a game that nudges people outdoors and into the company of strangers is an unusual thing to have survived a decade. The anniversary is, in that sense, less a celebration of a product than of a habit it created: the small, faintly absurd, oddly communal act of going outside to catch something that is not really there.
