Playing Pokemon Go kicked off a mini health craze all over the globe, and so far Niantic’s joint community of Ingress (the app that laid the groundwork for Pokemon Go) and Pokemon Go players have walked off a mountain of eggs. It’s hard to comprehend just how far that is, though, but Niantic has a rather impressive stat for you: overall 23 billion kilometers have been walked using the company’s AR games. Now that is a lot of steps.
Archit Bhargava, Head of Product Marketing at Niantic, revealed the information at a Harry Potter: Wizards Unite event, clarifying that Niantic’s “collective community has walked 23 billion kilometers so far”. Just to put that in context, “the distance in kilometers from Earth to Pluto is 7.5 billion kilometers, so this is three trips as a collective community that people have walked.” That’s making my legs hurt just thinking about it.
5 million people play the game daily, and its launch even led to quite a few stories about players who had managed to lose huge amounts of weight while walking off eggs or even just trekking across the country to find an elusive Pokemon. With initial traffic to the game 50 times what Niantic was expecting, perhaps this number shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. But hey, 23 billion is pretty damn impressive. Let’s see if Harry Potter: Wizards Unite can top it...
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