Pokémon Go thanks players with this week’s double XP event

Niantic and The Pokémon Company International are giving special thanks to players of Pokémon Go by launching new benefits for logging in during the Thanksgiving holiday week.

The game gives you higher scores the more you walk while playing it. So the more you walk, the more you can eat. Trainers will earn double XP and Stardust when completing in-game actions from November 22 at 4 p.m. Pacific time through November 29 at 4 p.m. Pacific time. The idea is to get us all walking and exercising at a time when we’re normally catatonic from food intake. Pokémon Go has already been the most successful mobile game in history, generating more than 500 million downloads and an estimated $600 million in revenues in its first 90 days after its launch in July.

“It has been an incredible experience since we launched Pokémon Go a few short months ago in July,” Niantic Labs said in a statement. “We are passionate about creating experiences that encourage exploration and promote exercise. We are humbled that hundreds of millions of you around the world have joined us on this journey. So we would like to say thank you – and what better way to say thank you than to celebrate our community.”

Fans are awaiting bigger updates such as the addition of player-versus-player, but Pokémon Go brought back a lot of lapsed players when it launched its previous special event during Halloween.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.