Trainers,
one of our London field agents (thanks Daniel!) had the privilege to attend the Mixed Reality Summit during the London Games Festival, which featured John Hanke, the CEO of Niantic.
Hanke joined the panel for a fireside chat, discussing the present and the future of Pokémon GO and AR market in general. Fortunately, Hanke shared some very important bits of information for the future of Pokemon GO!
Without further ado, here are all the important quick bits that Hanke shared:
- 65M trainers play the game every month – ‘healthy number of players’!
- Unity3D is not going anywhere, Niantic is continuing to use it for future development
- Hanke highlighted the idea of “outdoor social cooperative gameplay” many times, confirming that this what they’re working on right now
- Hanke also said that the version they launched in 2016 was only the “social component” of the game they want to have in 2017 (see Quote #1)
- Ingress to be relaunched later this year
We were surprised to hear how progressive Hanke’s plans are, as they’re mostly focused on three things: innovation, teamplay, outdoors. Hanke hinted they’re exploring innovative options for Pokémon GO; they’re not shying away from experiments.
The guiding line of his chat was that AR is just starting and that Pokémon GO opened the “mixed reality” doors for everyone.
Some interesting quotes he shared:
- “Group play and social play are key to those sort of products.” – referring to AR games
- “Wearable tech complements phone nicely, but can’t deliver full game”
- “Innovation is good; the next big thing will be something people don’t expect and that hasn’t been done before” – Hanke referring to the general world of AR gaming
- “What shipped is a pretty pure version of what was envisioned for Pokémon Go. More features to come this year tho!”
All in all, a great talk with quite a bit of information. Big thanks to Daniel of London fame for reporting!
