Pokémon Go at 10: 2,000 Players Battle Mewtwo in Times Square

There’s a version of Thursday night in Times Square that looks perfectly ordinary — rain-slicked streets, tourists squinting up at the billboard canyon, the usual chaos. Then you notice that nearly 2,000 people are staring at their phones in near-perfect unison, throwing virtual attacks at a psychic superbeing projected across the square’s screens. Pokémon Go turned 10 this week, and Scopely — the mobile publisher that acquired Niantic last year — chose to mark the occasion by finally delivering on a promise the game made before it even launched.

• Pokémon Go celebrated its 10th anniversary by staging its most ambitious live event ever in Times Square, New York.
• Nearly 2,000 invited Pokémon Go players defeated Mega Mewtwo Y in a coordinated raid mirroring the game’s original 2016 trailer.
• Scopely reports over 800 million lifetime players, $6 billion in total spending, and 100 million active users in 2024.
• Daily playtime is up 10 percent and real-world exploration has grown 29 percent since Scopely acquired Niantic for $3.5 billion.

A Promise Made in 2016, Kept in 2025

Before Pokémon Go dropped in July 2016, its debut trailer ended with an arresting image: a crowd of trainers converging on Times Square to collectively take down Mewtwo while the city’s billboards lit up with the battle. It was aspirational marketing — the kind of thing you file under ‘wouldn’t that be cool’ and move on. Except the team behind the game never forgot it. ‘We sort of made promises to players on the type of game that this was going to be,’ says Michael Steranka, vice president of product at Scopely, who has worked on Pokémon Go since 2017. ‘Now, 10 years later, when we look back at that trailer, we feel like we’ve actually delivered on a lot of the promises made there.’

Nine years of global Pokémon Go Fests came and went without anyone recreating that specific scene. This week, it finally happened. Two thousand players — selected from across New York City’s five boroughs via community ambassadors — received invitations without being told exactly what they were walking into. They knew there were themed raids near Times Square. The rest was kept deliberately vague. At a preset moment, push notifications directed ticketed players to converge on the square, where an EDM set from Loud Luxury was already underway. Then Mega Mewtwo Y took over the screens, and the raid began. Mewtwo lost.

The Numbers Behind a Decade of Pokémon Go

Pokémon Go’s staying power is one of mobile gaming‘s more remarkable stories. The game pulled in more than 130 million downloads in its first month and hit a peak of 232 million active players in 2016 — figures that still read as staggering nine years later. Most mobile games burn bright and fade fast. Pokémon Go didn’t. According to Statista, lifetime player spending has now crossed $6 billion, and the game generated $1 billion in revenue in 2025 alone. More than 800 million people have played it across its lifetime, with over 1 trillion Pokémon caught. Active players are averaging 45 minutes of daily engagement — a figure most subscription apps would envy. They’ve collectively walked more than 62 billion miles.

The 2024 numbers are particularly telling. Pokémon Go had over 100 million active players last year, daily playtime is up 10 percent year-on-year, and real-world exploration — the actual going-outside part — is up 29 percent. That last stat matters more than it might seem. When a mobile game can demonstrably change people’s physical behaviour nearly a decade after launch, it’s operating in a different category entirely.

Scopely’s First Major Pokémon Go Moment

The Times Square event is also, in a sense, Scopely’s public coming-out party with the franchise. The company — best known for Monopoly Go!, which became one of the fastest mobile games ever to reach $1 billion in revenue — completed its $3.5 billion acquisition of Niantic last year. That’s a significant bet on a game that’s already a decade old. But Scopely clearly isn’t treating Pokémon Go as a mature asset to be milked carefully. The Times Square spectacle, the aggressive community investment, the year-on-year engagement growth — these read more like a relaunch than a maintenance strategy.

Mark Van Lommel, Scopely’s director of marketing communications, emphasised that the weekend’s Pokémon Go Fest Global event will bring the Mega Mewtwo Y experience to all players worldwide at no cost. That’s a smart move: let the Times Square event generate the headlines, then funnel the global audience into the same moment. ‘Everyone around the world can play that for free this weekend,’ Van Lommel said. It’s the kind of thinking that keeps a game’s player base feeling included rather than segmented into haves and have-nots.

The Community Is the Product

What Pokémon Go has built that most mobile games haven’t is a genuine community infrastructure. In just two years, the game’s network of vetted community ambassadors — volunteers who organise local in-person groups — has grown from 50 to more than 3,000 worldwide. Live events, always the game’s marquee differentiator, sold nearly 1 million tickets in 2024. Kim Adams, vice president of game development at Pokémon Go, is clear-eyed about why this matters: ‘We are nothing without all of those people who contributed to the game in that way; we are in service of them.’

That’s not just PR-speak. The game’s Wayfarer programme — in which players nominate real-world landmarks as in-game waypoints — represents an ongoing, unpaid contribution of geographic and cultural data from the player base. Howie Ragunton, a US Federal Aviation Administration worker who has played since launch day in 2016, spends time on the road nominating remote airstrips and small-town landmarks that would otherwise never appear in the game. He doesn’t get paid for it. He gets some in-game items. ‘Pokémon Go has helped me stay sane,’ he says. ‘I don’t work at big airports all the time; I work at these airports that don’t even have passenger flights — they just have private flights — but they’re in nowhere places, in small towns. But Pokémon Go is always there.’

Ragunton’s story isn’t unusual in the Pokémon Go community — it’s representative. He met his wife through the game, proposed to her at a Pokémon Go event in June, and credits the app with helping him build a social life after relocating from Texas to Chicago. The first Chicago Pokémon Go Fest in 2017 was, by most accounts, a disaster — overloaded cell networks, crashing servers, refunds. ‘They’ve learned throughout the years,’ Ragunton says simply. That evolution from technical catastrophe to coordinated Times Square spectacle is its own story about what a decade of iteration looks like.

What the Next 10 Years Look Like

Steranka is willing to make a prediction. The Pokémon intellectual property — one of the most valuable entertainment franchises on the planet — will continue to give the game a commercial floor that few mobile titles enjoy. But his real bet is on the communities the game has built in the physical world. ‘The plan is to continue investing in those spaces and helping create more core memories,’ he says. It sounds like marketing language until you consider the numbers behind it: double-digit engagement growth, a live event business approaching a million tickets a year, a volunteer workforce of 3,000 community managers operating worldwide without a salary.

Pokémon Go arriving at its 10th anniversary in growth — rather than graceful decline — puts it in genuinely rare company. Most mobile games that launch with this kind of cultural impact are footnotes within three years. The question for the next decade isn’t whether Pokémon Go can survive; it’s whether Scopely can translate the game’s community-first approach into the kind of platform that holds up against whatever the next wave of mixed-reality technology brings. Apple Vision Pro exists. AR glasses are coming from multiple directions. Pokémon Go was essentially ahead of its time in 2016, and it may yet find itself ahead of the curve again.

Source: Wired

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