Trainers,
we have observed some very confused (and some straight up offensive) comments on the choice of the cover image on our last article: Niantic (Japan) confirms a huge Pokémon GO Event in Summer of 2017!
As GO Hub is read by tens (and hundreds) of thousands of trainers every day, we understand that confusion sometimes mandated by that volume. It’s time to clear up that confusion.
A number of reports accused us of “click bait” content due to our choice of the cover image, which depicts a fan made Mew Two event. The fact of the matter is simple: we strongly believe that the event in question is a Legendary Pokémon event using the new raid infrastructure.
A number of you may be wondering why do we so firmly believe that this huge event has anything to do with raids and Legendary Pokémon. Here’s the timeline of events that lead us to believe that:
- March 03: Wired.de talks with John Hanke, Niantic CEO, who says the following about legendary Pokémon: “I can safely say we’ll see more of it this year”.
- March 18: Nick from Trainer Tips discovers that people from The Pokémon Company are working closely with Niantic on an upcoming Pokémon GO feature.
- April 4: GO Hub covers Hanke’s panel on the London Game Festival where he confirms his and Niantic’s interest in outdoors co-op gameplay features
- April 7: Niantic officially confirms that they’ll be releasing cooperative gameplay features this spring
- April 7: Messages mentioning local raids discovered in the Pokémon GO network traffic
- April 11: K-Tai Watch interviews high ranking Niantic employees from Japan. They confirm that a huge event is taking place this summer
Moreover, after talking to a number of app and game developers, it’s a well established belief that Niantic will do the following in the next few months:
- release the “cooperative social gameplay features” (raids) during Spring
- test the scale and performance of the features until Q3 starts in June
- use those features to introduce world wide legendary raids, with legendary Pokémon migrating across the world
These devs, with whom we regularly talk and discuss data mining, are well established professionals, with years (some even decades) of experience in the game industry, who know and understand the technical difficulties of launching a worldwide scale event.
With that being said, we hope this post clarifies any leftover confusion.