Niantic (NIA) has officially addressed the growing uncertainty in the Pokemon GO community, following up on the recent Harry Potter: Wizards Unite announcement with a blog post titled “Looking Ahead”, written by John Hanke, NIA’s CEO.
Key takeaways (TLDR):
- Niantic is doubling down on Pokemon GO
- Niantic is actively hiring across all development teams
- We will hear more news about changes to certain Pokemon GO features next week
Players have expressed concern over the state of Pokemon GO feature set and the Niantic’s commitment in the months to come. Surprisingly, Niantic has clearly stated their intentions, reassuring the Pokemon GO community that they are committed to the game.
Hanke responded with the following statement:
We–the Pokémon GO development team–want to say that we are 100% committed to creating an ever-changing and growing game that gets our players exploring, meeting each other, and deepening their connection to the Pokémon universe. We’re actively expanding the Pokémon GO development team to build many more amazing features in 2018. Stay tuned for an update next week on upcoming improvements to certain features.
In a swift turn around from the usual lack of communication, Hanke confirmed that development on Pokemon GO is not going to be impeded by their new Warner Bros engagement. Curiously, this is the first time we’ve seen Niantic hint that more news will be announced in the nearby future (marked bold in the quote above).
The blog post was quickly followed up in a tweet by the official Niantic Twitter account, stating that they are “doubling down” and 100% focusing on adding more features to the game:
We want to assure the Pokémon GO community that we're doubling down and are 100% focused on adding many more fun features to the game. https://t.co/Uiz48kvxbu
— Niantic, Inc. (@NianticLabs) November 10, 2017
In the meantime, websites from the newly formed Harry Potter Wizards Unite reddit community are reporting that Niantic is not the actual developer behind Wizards Unite’s game play loop.
According to Critical.gg, Niantic is partnering with Portkey Games as a “platform developer and AR consultant”, while Portkey will develop the main game play features. We have no confirmation of this as of now, but we’ll reach out to Niantic for possible clarification.
In the mean time, you can join the next week’s hype on the Hub and enjoy the ride. It seems that neither Pokemon GO, nor Ingress, are not going away anytime soon.
