'Pokemon GO' Players Have Walked Enough Miles to Reach Pluto

Together, Pokémon GO players have logged so many miles walking in 2016 that they would’ve been able to reach Pluto and leave it in the dust. Niantic announced on Tuesday that, as of December 7, players had walked a collective 8.7 billion kilometers (slightly more than 4.5 billion miles) while playing the game. That’s enough to circle the Earth 200,000 times.

The last time Niantic shared stats like this was back in September, when they reported that players had covered 4.6 billion kilometers. Pokémon GO has taken a bit of a popularity hit since then, to say the least, but the game’s players have still managed to nearly double that distance. Pluto has an elliptical orbit — it’s 4.28 billion kilometers away from Earth at its closest, and 7.5 billion kilometers away at its farthest. In either case, Pokémon GO players would’ve left it in the dust.

“A commercial jetliner would take more than 1,000 years to cover the same distance,” Niantic said in a release.

Over the course of that long walk, players caught 88 billion Pokémon, which comes out to about 533 million Pokémon a day on average. Hopefully, the full implementation of Pokémon from Generation 2 will keep people out and about.