SYDNEY, Oct. 19 -- A lack of new features to replace the ones removed in the once popular Pokemon Go game is largely the main reason behind the game's rapid decline in popularity, an Australian finance professor said on Wednesday.
The game's huge draw has soured since its launch in July, but losing almost a third of daily users by mid-August. By mid-September, according to Bloomberg, its daily downloads had declined from a peak of 27 million users to 700,000 while its daily revenues (for the game) had fallen from 16 million U.S. dollars to two million U.S. dollars a day.
While many mobile games, especially those triggering a worldwide craze, suffer declines in usage over time, the precipitous decline in Pokemon Go, despite still generating strong revenue, has seen it be labeled a fad, University of New South Wales associate professor of finance Mark Humphery-Jenner told Xinhua.
"The developers did not introduce new elements quickly enough to stop players getting bored after removing popular features," Humphery-Jenner said.
"I find that these could be main reason behind the dramatic drop in the number of players since the game first launched several months back."
Among the popular features removed was a crucial third party tracking app that was developed because the original was relatively rudimentary and arguably did not work.
Developer Niantic had disabled these apps via cutting off their data access and sending cease and desist orders.
"A core aspect of the game is that it creates a virtual representation of the player's real-world location, which is then populated with Pokémon characters for players to collect by walking around," Humphery-Jenner said.
"But to catch a Pokémon, players need to know where they are and without Pokémon tracking, players are left wandering aimlessly and relying on luck to find them."
But it is not all doom and gloom for the once hugely popular game, Humphery-Jenner said the game's developers need to open access to other countries to get their mojo back.
"The game is still not legally available in many countries and if they were to expand to other markets (such as China and India), I believe it will help in increasing their revenue," Humphery-Jenner said.
