As we near 2016’s end, Pokémon Go developer Niantic is reflecting on just how far the game has come since its July launch — and how far its players have traveled. To collect some of the game’s most astounding data points, Niantic made the video above, showing off some wild stats from the past five months.
Chief among those wild Pokémon Go numbers is just how many kilometers players have walked while playing the game. As of Dec. 7, Niantic says that they’ve traveled 8.7 billion kilometers just by walking outside in the search for new Pokémon to catch. The developer put this another way, to convey just how far that is: That distance is comparable to more than 200,000 trips around the Earth.
During all that walking, Pokémon trainers caught a total of 88 billion monsters. On average, that’s equivalent to collecting more than half a billion Pokémon per day, according to Niantic’s equations.
We wouldn’t be surprised to see those numbers decline slightly, now that we’ve hit colder weather. Niantic has given Pokémon Go players reason to keep trekking into the great and chilly outdoors, however; spawn rates have increased in both urban and more isolated, rural areas as of the game’s most recent updates. There are also new baby Pokémon to be hatched, which requires players getting out there and logging even more kilometers.
