A senior company official has revealed that Niantic is already thinking about Pokemon GO’s next decade. The executive also suggested that the recent updates to Pokemon GO are just the beginning of what the studio has planned for the game in the lead-up to its tenth anniversary.
Following its July 2016 release, Niantic’s groundbreaking geolocation game quickly became the talk of the world. Although Pokemon GO’s game play loop, which focuses on real-world exploration, may not seem inherently compatible with lockdowns, the global pandemic has helped the game make a lot of money.
This may be because Niantic was quick to respond by giving players ways to keep trying to catch all the Pokemon without having to move around too much.
A hit mobile game that came out four years ago is almost nine years old, but the developer from California is already thinking about the second decade. In a recent interview with Eurogamer, Ed Wu, Senior Vice President of Pokemon GO at Niantic, confirmed this.
The executive who helped build Pokemon GO’s codebase from the very beginning revealed that the recent updates that changed some parts of the game are just the beginning of the developer’s latest efforts to make the game more appealing in the long run.
Ongoing Pokemon GO Refresh Is Meant To Befit Its ‘Next Decade’
“We’re putting a lot of investment into ensuring it’s a great game and has really firm foundations for the next ten years,” said he.
On that note, Wu revealed that Niantic is already thinking about the game’s tenth anniversary and wants to celebrate it with “a refresh that’s befitting that game decade.” Both the much more controversial revamp of the Pokemon GO avatar system and the biome background changes that are currently in testing are included in these efforts to modernize the game.
We’re putting a lot of investment into ensuring it’s a great game and has really firm foundations for the next ten years.
Reports of Declining Pokemon GO Revenues Are Incomplete, Niantic Says
WU said he “can confidently say the game is growing” right now, which brings us back to the present. Several recent reports suggesting that Pokemon GO’s revenue has been steadily declining in the post-pandemic era may lead some industry watchers to label this revelation as surprising.
Wu, however, claims that third-party trackers don’t have the whole picture and points to the game’s web store opening in April 2023 as a major revenue source that is exempt from mobile player spending reports.
It can offer PokeCoins at lower prices because it is exempt from paying a 33% cut of every sale to Google or Apple. As another example of the game’s strong current momentum, Wu brought up the Sinnoh Tour event in late February 2024.
He said that the promotion had led to the game’s most successful week ever “by many metrics.” While the executive acknowledged that resolving Pokemon GO’s technical issues is still a work in progress, he also mentioned how Niantic has made significant progress in recent years in making the game more scalable, suggesting that this may help it avoid some types of problems moving forward.
