Given how easy it was for Nintendo and Niantic to make this launch a solid one in the beginning though, we don’t doubt that the companies have a few aces up their sleeves and aren’t going to let this product die down so easily.
It’s a money printer, according to some, and it would be silly to see the game fading away due to a lack of development effort, but so far this doesn’t seem to be a real risk. The release of the Pokemon GO Plus and the Apple Watch app should help secure its place on the market for at least a little longer.
Other companies have apparently been eyeing this idea themselves, but it wouldn’t be so easy for someone else to join this market right now, as Niantic had a unique advantage when they released the game.
Or rather, several unique advantages. They didn’t only have a powerful brand name to work with, but also a large database of location data that they had collected from “Ingress”, their previously released game which never reached the same levels of popularity.
It would be difficult for another company to quickly replicate/populate such a database, so it’s probably safe to assume that “Pokemon GO” will be able to retain its uniqueness factor for at least a little longer. We wouldn’t be surprised if a major studio is already considering copying the idea for their own franchises, however, and there is certainly a lot of potential for that.