Enlarge / Don’t cry, Pikachu. Millions of people still want to catch you!

I went away for a short holiday with family this past weekend, and didn’t pay much attention to gaming news. Imagine my surprise, then, reading the headlines on Tuesday morning and finding that Pokémon Go, by some measures the most insanely popular mobile game of all time, had already “lost its luster,” as the headline from our own UK correspondent put it.

There’s definitely some basis for such a summary. Pokémon Go has lost over 12 million active users since its peak of just above 45 million in mid-July, according to Apptopia data summarized in a Bloomberg report. That month-long, roughly 25 percent drop from peak usage certainly sounds like the beginning of the end for what was recently an unquestionable phenomenon. Projecting things out linearly, you might even expect Pokémon Go to completely lose its user base by winter.

When you look at Pokémon Go‘s decline next to other mobile games, however, the expected drop-off in players doesn’t look so dire or so surprising. While Pokémon Go‘s popularity peak might already be behind it, there’s reason to believe the game’s long tail can continue to attract millions (if not tens of millions) of loyal players for a long while.