A new flow of Location Based Service mobile games: Non-stickiness on Pokémon Go

Upon its release in July 2016, Pokémon Go, a Location Based Service game achieved astonishing popularity and became one of the world's most widely played mobile games. However, this wave of popularity soon peaked and the user base quickly lost interest. This study examines the lack of stickiness of the Pokémon Go application over time. The research model hypothesizes that intrinsic motivation, network externalities, and serendipity influence application stickiness, mediated by flow and user gratification. After surveying 600 samples, this proposed model was tested with a structural equation modeling approach. Unlike previous studies, the results reveal that gratification plays a more important role than flow in retaining users. Furthermore, over time the impact of network externalities and intrinsic motivation gradually disappeared, leaving only a weak serendipity-gratification-stickiness relationship. These findings might explain the game's drop off in popularity.