Over the summer, tens of millions of Trainers around the world played Pokémon GO together every month, with a 35% increase in active usage since May.

You might remember the popular AR game Pokémon GO from our last seminar. Well their creators Niantic have just announced in a recent blog post that they’ve recently increased their active user base by 35%.

It’s because Pokémon is utilising a Games as a Service model. We’re covering this in great detail in our new seminar, The Features of Fortnite. Because really, this growth isn’t something that should surprise you

Games as a Service (GaaS) models are incredibly popular. GaaS represents providing ongoing new game content to monetise your product after initial sale, or to support a free-to-play model. And both Pokémon GO and Fortnite are doing this incredibly.

Ongoing, consistent content and community management. These are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to running a successful GaaS model. Creating a successful digital product, whether it’s software, apps or a game, that uses the GaaS model is no easy task… But here’s what Pokémon GO has done…

At launch there were 150 Pokémon to catch. Today there are 386.

They’ve achieved such a great increase, years after release, with consistent new content and social features.

Community is the back bone of any GaaS model. And with their breadth of events and community engagement they’ve achieved an incredible result.

After the introduction of social features such as trading they saw a huge increase as well. “…more than 113 million Friend connections have been made and 2.2 billion Gifts have been sent to friends….“ showing the power of social integrations.