The Niantic team did incredible things given the instant historic success that became Pokemon Go.
The generic 1X, 5X and 50X are hard to understand in this context I think. Pokemon is so popular it's very difficult in imaging what the real numbers actually are. For instance on launch day in America and Asia I would have expected insane numbers (many hundreds of million).
I also feel like the 1X, 5X and 50X number placeholders are useless in this conversation because it doesn't give a sense of scale at all.
Given no app had ever done this in history over the first few weeks, yet alone on launch day with no marketing, I doubt it.
But in all seriousness this is Pokemon; they sold over 3 million copies of a remake of a game on a niche portable console in just 3 days; elevating its brand to an open platform for FREE that can be downloaded and installed on theoretically, what, a billion or more devices? Seems incredibly doable for Pokemon. Few other brands could do the same. Even Mario wouldn't be able to come close to competing with Pokemon's brand power.
I would be very interested in the real numbers :)
If this doesn't clearly show how crazy this growth was compared to what anyone was expecting, I'm not sure we're operating in the same plane.
"Many hundreds of millions" implies at least three of them.
I would not expect the entire population of the US to be playing on day one, especially the roughly 50% of them that don't even own a phone.
Sigh. This would have been easier if we had real numbers. Let us all test our hypothesis. Oh well.