Indonesia's Mobile Users on Pokémon Go - Survey Report

The game Pokémon Go has been a trending topic all over the world since the past month or so. In its early phase of development only a few select countries had the ability to officially download and install the game. However, because the talk was all over the media, more and more people might have gotten curious, even those from countries that have not gotten the official game release yet. Indonesia is one example. Therefore through this survey and article we would like to deliver information on how Indonesia’s mobile users react to Pokémon Go.

What is it that triggers mobile users to download and install the game the most? We were wondering where the source of curiosity came from. We found out that our respondents, 40.92%, installed the game mainly because they saw news about the highly talked about game on many media. Being long fans of Pokémon falls to the number two reason, for 20.62% of the respondents. Shared posts of the game within the circle of friends made the reason for 17.23% of the respondents to install it. Lastly, 9.23% of the respondents installed the game because they admittedly have had an interest in games involving Augmented Reality (AR) as the main concept of play.

Interestingly enough, at first we had a slight assumption that the respondents playing the game have previously been fans of Pokémon (before the existence of Pokémon Go); we were not entirely right. In our finding, we found that 45.54% of Indonesia’s mobile users represented by the respondents in this survey were not fans of Pokémon before the release of the game. That finding might mean there might be an increasing number of members in the fandom or the number will stay flat.

Since the concept of the game requires the players to walk about in real life we were wondering if that would give some effects to the players. We found that 54.46% of the respondents admitted that they go out more often because of the game. That is not entirely a bad effect for online game players. We even found out that 44.31% of the respondents socially made new friends because of the game. Isn’t that quite contradictive to the assumption that online games only make the players pay less attention to their social surroundings? We also found that 21.23% of the respondents who play the game joined a community of Pokémon Go enthusiasts.

We then wanted to know what topics are talked about among the players of Pokémon Go. 67.69% of the respondents admitted that they talked about the number of Pokémons that have been caught. 40.62% of the respondents talk about the game progress that is normally based on the player’s level in the game. 40% of the respondents admitted that they talk about the most powerful Pokémon successfully caught. 32% talk about the gameplay. 21.85% talk about the number of Poké stops ever visited. 21.54% talk about the number of Poké balls that have been collected. 19.69% talk about if Pikachu has been caught at least for once. Lastly, 15.08% of the respondents admitted that they talk about whether there has been a battle with a monster boss.

There has been news about how Pokémon Go might trigger technical errors or problems on to the phone where the game is installed or playing. In our findings, we found that the game causes a battery to drop faster than when the game is not on play, according to 72.62% of the respondents in this survey. 50.15% of respondents admitted that their phone gets very warm during the game. 40.31% admitted the Internet data tends to decrease a lot as compared to when the game is not on play. Lastly, 27.69% of the respondents admitted that their phone hangs or stops working when the game is on play.

We are now closing this article with a discussion about the group from non Pokémon Go players. We asked them why they are not playing the game. The number one reason is because they are not fans of Pokémon to begin with, according to 36.24% of non-playing respondents. Then, 16.74% of respondents said that their phone is not compatible to install the game. 19.37% of respondents admitted that their phone experiences technical problems. Lastly, 12.08% of respondents admitted that they are just not interested in the game.

To end this article, we asked the respondents who are also not players of Pokémon Go, about their curiosity of the game itself.

What we found tends to be negative. 60.12% of the respondents said that they do not wish to play the game even though they cannot, technically. 81.22% said they did not try playing the game on someone else’s phone. Also, 63.32% of the respondents do not watch online videos about how the game is played just to kill their curiosity about the game.

For more detail you can download XLS report at the button below (bahasa). JAKPAT report consists of 3 parts which are 1) Respondent Profile, 2) Crosstabulation for each question and 3) Raw Data. Respondent profile shows you demographic profiles ( gender,age range, location by province, and monthly spending). Cross tabulation enables you to define different demographic segment preference on each answer.