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Pokemon Boom And Bust

Editor’s Morning Note: The Pokemon bump, visualized.

Screen Shot 2016-07-26 at 9.48.54 AM

The author thinks that this might be a Pokemon.

Pokemon Go, the global gaming phenomenon helped create my new favorite chart.

Following the massive success of the Go game, Nintendo shares rose rapidly; if a Pokemon game, a brand closely associated with Nintendo, was exploding, surely the company’s value was on the way up!

To an extent. However, after a massive rally shares of Nintendo have retreated, leading to the following sort of headline:

Screen Shot 2016-07-26 at 9.30.05 AM

Well then.

The enthusiasm decline was notable for its scale, and also for the fact that preceding the correction — note that the above headline is from yesterday — there were discussions about the scale of impact that Go would have on Nintendo’s value. People weren’t sure, given the ownership structure between the participating companies. Those concerns bore out.

You deserve a chart, so let me help. Here’s Nintendo’s share price over the past month:
Screen Shot 2016-07-26 at 9.26.05 AM

Pink lines and text courtesy of Mattermark, chart via Google Finance.

As you have already noticed, however, Nintendo remains far above its prior trading range; also, note the raw increase in volatility on a comparative-currency basis.

In normalspeak, the company is still far more valuable than it was before Pokemon Go turned your friends into kids again1, so not all is lost from a financial perspective.

Eyeballing as it’s early, if Nintendo was trading for around 15,000, and is still above the 22,000 mark, the company is up around 50 percent. That’s all very rough in terms of accuracy, but close enough for today.

As we start to discuss Peak App it’s almost ironic that, at last, a single app has the ability to so dramatically change the value of a company largely outside the space.

If you want a deeper dive into the mechanics and brilliance behind the game — why it has succeeded as much as it has, in other words — you can’t improve on TechCrunch’s own Matthew Lynley’s journalism. You can find all of that here. Godspeed.

  1. The mark of a truly amazing experience is its transformative powers. Seeing so many joyful adults out and about puts me squarely in the Long Live Pokemon camp.

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Featured Image via Flickr user Morgan under CC BY 2.0. Image has been cropped.
© Mattermark 2024. Sources: Mattermark Research, Crunchbase, AngelList.
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