A little over a month after announcing changes to its Remote Raid feature, Pokemon Go is facing the lowest sales it has had in the last five years.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Pokemon Go received sales of $ 34.7 million for the month of April.
This is a serious dip from the $ 42.8 million it had made in March, and an even more drastic dip from the $ 57.9 million it made just last February.
This places the game as the number 12 highest grossing mobile game globally. So, these are still large numbers for any game in general. Pokemon Go itself frequently sees that number fluctuate throughout the year, but a dip of 40 % in two months is definitely nothing to sneeze at.
Video Games Chronicle reports on how the Remote Raid changes were made without accommodations for disabled players, but there is something else going on here.
As we had reported, Niantic knew they would be seeing an immediate drop in revenue thanks to the changes. It’s a risk that they had decided to take because they were looking at the bigger picture.
Niantic also knows that a comparatively smaller number of their player base is reliant on Remote Raids. Unfortunately, it does seem that they were willing to lose disabled players who can’t adjust to Niantic’s changes, but once again, Niantic has a good reason for it.
That bigger picture is trying to fix the overall Pokemon Go play experience. While it made sense for everyone to be using Remote Raids to play Pokemon Go at the peak of the pandemic, Niantic has reasoned that many of their players are now spending more time outside.
Unfortunately, being able to utilize Remote Raids while also playing outside means that players run out of things to do on Pokemon Go more quickly. And so, Niantic has to change behaviors of Remote Raid players as part of the rebalancing of the overall game.
Niantic won’t know if their plans are going to work out until a few months from now, but based solely on revenue, this is not a great sign for them. Niantic will definitely have more data than the public will know in this regard, such as if more players are now playing outside, and subsequently, if they are spending more time playing as a result.
All things considered, it would be better if Niantic did add new accommodations for disabled players in Pokemon Go. But fans are not likely to convince Niantic by scaring them with threats of lower revenue. It really should be the principle of accessibility for all that should drive that action.
