Niantic’s Mike Quigley on Pokemon GO: launch woes, third party apps, the game’s lifespan, more
After yesterday’s interview with gameindustry.biz, Eurogamer also got the chance to sit down and talk with Mike Quigley, Niantic’s chief marketing officer, to talk about Pokemon GO. You can read the full interview here; below are a couple of interesting tidbits:
On how the success of Pokemon GO caught them off guard:
“There’s no way to sugarcoat it, we were overwhelmed by how [Pokémon GO] took off. The success of the product caught us out of position in a couple of areas – we fully admit it. The summer was quite painful – no one slept much. But this has always been a marathon not a sprint. You can look back at Ingress and see that.”
“We can look back and wish we had more resources for certain things, but we kind of weathered it and hopefully people say ‘oh, we are hearing from them more now, there’s more transparency’. And for what it’s worth, regardless of headcount or staffing, one of the reasons people weren’t hearing from us is that there were so many things going on with servers and stuff that was, frankly, distracting the company. We just wanted to make sure the game was still up and running. That took everyone and their focus to take care of things.”
On third party apps and server stress:
“They were just crushing us on the server side. I won’t say it’s a no-win situation but it’s a tough balance. You’ve got to keep fans happy but you also have to keep the core product accessible.”
“Some of the server outages back in July were a punch in stomach. For us, for fans, for The Pokémon Company too – it’s not a good signal for their brand. We’re very close to them and we have to do right by the brand, by our players and Niantic. That’s why we had to make some of those hard decisions like blocking third-party sites. It’s difficult but ultimately it’s the right thing to do for the life of the product.”
On the game’s lifespan and its update structure:
“Yes, we looked at mobile game curves and yes we modeled some of this, although the initial curve was far higher than expected.As for how we modeled it, we’re trying not to get distracted by [headlines like] ‘There’s a huge fall-off! Pokémon Go’s dead!’. There’s a lot of those stories which have been written. We’re like, ‘guys, it’s just noise. We know what we’re doing, we know what we want to build. We’re listening to the community.”
“But we are more an MMO than anything else. We have two week client sprints, two week server-side sprints. Every two weeks there’s new content or bug fixes going in the game. There’s key content releases we’re planning.”
“I think our lifespan and curve may be quite different from a free-to-play mobile game – it may be more in a [World of] Warcraft vein just because of the type of game we are. It’s not about taking a bunch of money off the table and going. Monetisation has never been the focus for us. It’s about doing right by the brand and doing right by the fans.”
