Pokémon GO's Halloween event breathes new life into the game

While folks were out collecting oodles of Candies and snatching up ghostly pokémon, developer Niantic was having its best week in quite some time. According to data reports from Sensor Tower, Pokémon Go's revenue from in-app purchases (IAPs) increased by a massive %133, placing the app once again at the top of the App Store charts for highest grossing product.

In the first few days of the event, Pokémon GO earned approximately $23 million, where the game was making $10 million the week before. Interestingly enough, that means previously Pokémon GO was still making $2 million daily, which, even after all of the doom and gloom about players flocking from the game, is quite a number.

These numbers are expected to settle back down now that the Candy bonuses have ended and the event pokémon have gone back to their normal feeding grounds. The aftermath of the Halloween event still leads us to speculate on how Niantic will use this success to create further events in the future.

Niantic is still ironing out how to handle live events involving rare pokémon without excluding populations of players, but this holiday format could continue to boost the game's numbers if Niantic chooses to take advantage. We could easily see events for Christmas featuring festive pokémon and similar levelling bonuses players were treated to on Halloween. Afterall, the event was a huge success, and the company didn't even have to add new content -- the pokémon promoted were already in the game.

Eventually Niantic will need to add more features, but for now they can still bank on the core game if they're creative. This will give them more time to work on new content for the game while keeping up fan interest. It could be likely that we have many more exciting activities like those we saw this Halloween to look forward to.