Ever since Pokemon GO launched, Niantic has famously not said an awful lot. And at the Disrupt conference this week in San Francisco, CEO John Hanke spent a good deal of time talking without saying nothing.
But before leaving the stage, he provided one solid nugget of information about Pokemon GO’s future. Events are coming, and they’re a natural fit for launching new Pokemon.
“We’re kind of waiting for the launch craziness to subside, and then we can get to work, do the hard work of planning,” Hanke replied when asked directly about Pokemon GO events. “It’s hard to put on an event for 10,000-plus people, you guys know putting on this event, organising, getting space and all that.
“But yeah, the introduction of new Pokemon into the world and having events where that might be showcased, those concepts go together really well. I think you can expect to see that happen in a kind of synchronised way as we move forward.”
Hanke also revealed that Niantic was originally planning to slowly educate and inform players about Pokemon GO over many months, not expecting the game to become a social phenomenon.
“We certainly didn’t expect that, our marketing plan was not that, it was to sort of gradually bring people on board to teach them about the game, to market the game over the course of many, many months,” the Niantic CEO explained. “And what happened is that all got compressed into the span of two or three weeks, and essentially everybody in the world who has a smartphone heard about the game through social media.
“We didn’t do any advertising or marketing, and so there was this massive influx of people into the front-end of that, you know that customer acquisition pipeline. Now those people are maturing, some people exited the game, some people turned out, and you have other people that are playing and then we have a smaller but steady influx of new users coming into the game all the time.”
Hanke also indicated that player vs player battles was “something that will probably make our way onto our roadmap” for upcoming features, but he refused multiple times to give any timeframe as to when that might happen.
Comments
23 responses to “Pokemon GO Events Will Probably Be Used To Introduce New Pokemon”
Still fascinating.
This is great to hear, straight from the horse’s mouth, exactly how that crazy (very compressed) time period was like for those at the coal face.
Not sure we’ll see this trend continue though.
Just think of the poor marketing strategists
They spent time on that, brainstorming, planning it out, pitching it.
Seriously Niantic still doesnt have a clue… their answer to this is wait until their gaming population dies down to a size they can manage HAHAHA way to run a business.
Niantic hosted an event at Sydney Harbour two weeks before Pokemon Go went live… months of planning. If you can find the press article on it its laughable to think that small event can translate into a Pokemon event when 5 times as many people turned up to Sydney Opera house cause 1 facebook post went viral. The niantic marketing guy stsnding on the steps of the Opera House had NO CLUE pokemon go was coming out in 10 days…
When you have pokemon go players crowding public areas in the volumes that are reported in the media, if you turned ariund and said Mewtwo is only available at Sandiego comiccon you woukd just pack that whole centre with people wondering eehere it is (Oh wait propke thought that and caused a panic)
It’s good to FINALLY have an explanation for what stuff went down with PoGo, but at this stage, it’s too little, too late. I mean, if they released their reasoning for this a few months ago, we probably would be sated. But it’s been, what, a good few months since the release, and all the stuff with the PR rep (and all associated issues) has already worn down. Lots of people have left the game. Perhaps if this came earlier, then more people would be still be playing?
However, considering the other point of view, perhaps they were just waiting out the storm of salty players. There’s a time for everything. If Hanke released this long ago, perhaps it would add fuel to the fire. I’m not God (or omniscient) so I can’t say for sure.
Who honestly cares now?
Me… and the other 40 million people playing it.
Not sure why but the people that stopped playing are super vocal about it.
yeah ive noticed, its really strange.
I see hundreds/thousands of people a day in brissy… at night my local GYMS are constantly in a state of flux… i cant understand the hate coming from people who have stopped playing.
See I can’t stand the board game articles that have crept on in to the every day, but each to their own, you know.
They are not really that common are they? I simply go past stuff that doesn’t interest me though. A board game never killed my parents so I’m not going to open each article and bad mouth it.
The Hungry Hungry Hippos ATE my parents geez thanks for reminding me.
People like to feel superior if they stop doing something everyone else is. Just ask a born-again-Christian, a smoker who’s quit or a new vegan.
Everyone in my family plays it. 3 people in my work team do, and there’s an office IRC channel with 40+ users. I saw 4 different people playing it on the train home.
Sure, there may have been a 50% drop-off, but for a user base that was almost as big as Twitter in week 1, that’s still a huge user base.
Barely anyone. That app went to shit and lost it’s relevance.
I still play regularly, and have a small group of people that we competitively try to out-level each other, while also taking over Gyms.
I agree that the game was released as a half broken mess, my biggest gripe being that friends don’t know what team their mates chose, and can’t swap.
I disagree that it is no longer relevant, however as a company that has a successful game that will loose customers every month you need to tell them what is changing when so they know that things are going to get better/added with a specific date.
Knowing PVP is coming in X weeks would spur me on to train up some mon’s ready for battle.
Just shows how clueless they were with marketing. Even if they only had a couple million users there isn’t enough content to keep people playing for months. To try and string out a learning process over months is completely ridiculous too, these guys have no idea.
Name one other video game that taught players how to play over the period of months.
No Man’s Sky.
That hasn’t even been out for months….
So? They’ve been pushing it for months.
Ingress.
Adding extra content doesn’t count as teaching players how to play it.
Hence my point about there not being enough content to keep people playing for months let alone them being able to drag out teaching.
I spent some time learning how to play well and showed heaps of people stuff they did not know like powering bursters and glyph hacking.
In terms of in depth strategies you’re talking about a different type of learning. A game can take 5 minutes to learn and 5 years to master…just teaching someone the mechanics of a game and how to play shouldn’t take months and doesn’t.
It’s likely that he worded his statement poorly and meant something other than “teaching”.
The core mechanics are simple. Spin stops, throw balls at ‘mons. I could see a spread out strategy starting with teaching about egg hatching right through to individual stats and gym strategies. Dedicated players would (and have) figure it out themselves, but it would be introduced to casuals in a “gentler” manner.