The Pokémon Company and Niantic have announced an official Pokémon Go event for London this year, staged primarily in Brockwell Park.
Pokémon Go Fest 2023 will be held on the weekend of the August 4-6, starting off in South London’s Brockwell Park before spreading more widely around Greater London.
It is a ticketed event, costing £30 a pop. But until June 15, early bird tickets are available for £27.
What is Pokémon Go Fest?
The first Pokémon Go Fest was held in 2017, in Chicago, and has been held annually since — aside from in 2020 and 2021, when the pandemic forced the event to scale down dramatically.
This will be the first full-scale Pokémon Go Fest event to be held in London. While there was a pared-back version in London in 2021, it’s nothing like what we hope to see this August. You can read an attendee’s report from that year over at the Metro.
The Pokémon Go’s video on the 2019 Chicago event gives first-time fans an idea of what to expect — assuming the augmente- reality mobile game’s fan base hasn’t completely run out of steam four years later.
London’s Pokémon Go Fest is split into two sessions, the park part and the city part. You can approach these in either order. Start with the park and you can explore Brockwell from 9am to 1.30pm, and then head into the city from 2.30pm to 7.30pm — or the other way around.
This clear delineation of the morning and afternoon slots is probably a form of crowd control. The first European Pokémon Go Fest was held in Dortmund in 2019, and reportedly attracted 85,000 players to the event, while 200,000 were recorded in the surrounding area.
Pokémon Go Fest will of course see lots of specific Pokémon spawns, as well as “exclusive gameplay, special bonuses, and more” according to Pokémon Go Hub. We don’t yet know how much additional infrastructure and entertainment will be laid on at Brockwell Park, but it is no stranger to festivals, set to be home to Wide Awake, Cross the Tracks, and City Splash in May alone.
It is also not yet clear where else in Greater London Pokémon will start sprouting.
This year, the other lead Pokémon Go Fest events are to be held in Osaka, on the same weekend, and in New York, from August 18-20.
Is Pokémon Go still popular?
Pokémon Go reached a $6 billion (£4.9 bn) revenue milestone in June 2022, according to VentureBeat. And while its player count has dropped since the Pokémon Go mania of 2017, its daily user numbers range from five million to eight million, while monthly users are estimated at up to 80 million. These are not official figures released by publisher Niantic, but offer a rough idea of the ongoing popularity of the augmented-reality sensation.
In more recent news, Niantic is working on a Marvel-themed take on the Pokemon Go blueprint, called Marvel World of Heroes. It is due for release later this year.
