Pokémon Go madness: $3B value to Apple as players literally wandering into minefields

If you were of the view that the Pokémon Go hype has gotten completely out of hand, the evidence file just got thicker. Nintendo’s value has more than doubled since the game was launched, notes The Verge.

Ever since the launch of Pokémon Go earlier this month, Nintendo’s market capitalization has more than doubled, ending Tuesday trading at a fantastic $42.5 billion. Such has been the appetite for Nintendo stock, in fact, that on Friday it broke the single-day trading record in Tokyo this century, with $4.5 billion of stock changing hands.

Yep, that makes the games company – which only sees indirect benefits from Pokémon Go – worth more than Sony, at around $40B. And if that weren’t crazy enough, one analyst has even made the unlikely claim that the game could be worth $3B in revenue to Apple …

Needham & Company analyst Laura Martin argues that Apple’s 30% cut of in-app purchases could be worth $3B over 1-2 years.

We estimate that APPL could generate $3B of incremental high-margin revenue from Pokémon Go over the next 12-24 months. As background, Candy Crush generated more than $1B of revenue in each of 2013 and 2014 and Pokémon Go’s ratio of paid users to total users is 10x higher.

Given that Apple’s total App Store revenue last year was $20B, suggesting that it may see $3B from a single game – even over a two-year period – seems a little out there. But with in-app purchases reaching as high as $150, who knows how many people out there have completely lost their minds – and TNW has collated plenty of evidence.

In New York, a 28-year-old man crashed into a tree playing the game, while two others fell 50ft off a cliff in San Diego. Across the pond in the UK, four teenagers had to be rescued from a mine after getting lost in the complex for more than five hours. Police in Northern Ireland had to explicitly tell players, ‘But there’s a Zubat in there’ is NOT an excuse for breaking into someone’s house.

Distracted drivers are crashing into Police cars:

And making emergency calls to Police to report stolen Pokémon. Oh, and players in Bosnia had to be told not to wander into minefields …

If all that weren’t enough, there’s a Pokémon dating service too. So maybe the world is that crazy after all.

Photo: AP. Thanks, David, for two of the links.