In an interview with Vice, John Hanke, the CEO of Niantic Labs, shared a number of interesting facts on the current state and future of the game, with a number of exciting and crazy facts.
Hanke confirmed a number of speculations we made public last week and confirmed that the current version of the game is essentially a beta version of the game they plan to release. He also confirmed that features were cut and delayed to fix bug and improve server stability and performance. You can read our perspective on the current state of Pokémon GO here.
Some interesting points from the interview:
- bug fixing and server fixing due to initial launch stalled several features they wanted to have in the game already
- either PvP or trading would already be in the game today, if it were not for these setbacks
- Gen 2 is coming. Yeah, we know, tho that’s the first official word on it!
- he personally believes that delaying these features to fix bugs were “the right thing to do”. Says “It’s going to be done soon”.
- he believes current gyms are too rudimentary compared to what they want them to be. Want more depth, and specifically wants features that value cooperation between players (he mentioned this several times before last year) hopefully this means fundamental changes that would make sniping and shaving just history 😛
- “I think the more interesting thing for me is not extending the tracker, but basically making the world richer and adding more ways to interact with new kinds of things in the world.” – he repeats that new features should make the game more than just about catching.
- Reiterates that events are important to him and wants to do them before 2017 ends, but it’s harder to do Pokémon GO events than Ingress events because of scale.
Stay strong, stay playing!
