Niantic on Pokemon GO – success, cheating, server issues, and more
Yesterday, Forbes published an interview with Niantic CEO John Hanke. It covered Hanke’s early days with gaming, working at Keyhold, and eventually starting Niantic.
The middle part of the interview is where the discussion becomes interesting for Pokemon GO plans. Hanke talked about the game’s success thus far, cheating (some of “those things may not work in the future”), server issues, and other topics.
We’ve rounded up some of Hanke’s comments below. You can read Forbes’ full interview here.
On whether Pokemon GO would have been possible with Ingress, Niantic’s previous game…
JH: No. Who knows. It’s a counterfactual hypothetical. But it took a lot of iteration around Ingress and the building up of infrastructure and data and seeing what things worked and things that don’t. All that was rolled into Pokémon GO. If you had come out with Pokémon GO absent of that experience, I don’t know if we would have done anything that people would have liked or not. The whole infrastructure that the game runs on is the second-level technology stack that was built from Ingress.
The decision to go with a nichey, Sci-Fi game was very deliberate. We felt like it was the first time out of the gate with a nichey new genre of game. Instead of doing something really broad and trying to put a smiley face on it–a sort of pop app for the masses–we sort of went for the app for mid-core gamers because we felt they would be more tolerant of an imperfect product and they would be early adopters of a new technology.
On whether he’s seen anything like this before…
JH: You don’t see the physical manifestation of it. I think the first time I saw that was the day we launched Ingress and I went to get lunch and I heard the sound effects from a guy that was standing in line. That was amazing–to encounter the product of your labors out in the wild, you know? I asked him some questions: “Hey, what are you doing?” And then I told him I worked on it.
Pokémon GO is just this other level of penetration that I still don’t want to jinx it.
Since that flurry of negative press that came out there’s been a wave of positive stories in the past few days.
On those who try to cheat, such as one person who put up a train set around his home for his phone…
JH: Hah! To hatch his eggs? Well that’s kind of cheating, but it’s kind of creative and funny to so I don’t really mind it. He’s only cheating himself.
I saw a turntable hack. I saw that one for hatching eggs.
On the Poke Radar and things that tap into the code and show where Pokémon are spawning…
JH: Yeah, I don’t really like that. Not a fan.
We have priorities right now but they might find in the future that those things may not work. People are only hurting themselves because it takes some fun out of the game. People are hacking around trying to take data out of our system and that’s against our terms of service.
On what Niantic could add to Pokemon GO later that brings people back if they start to see numbers drop…
JH: Well there are a number of threads that you will start to see. You will see new Pokémon come into the game around special events at certain times in certain parts of the world. You’ll see us do some things around events. We initially thought that we would organize events ourselves like we did for Ingress. We’ll see if we do or not. There are a lot of self-organizing events that are happening and maybe we just support those. There are some things that we do in game with the gameplay to make the events more interesting.
Some of this, it’s not like we’re withholding our secret plan from you. We intend to iterate and work on these specs right up until the moment it ships. Stuff evolves until the last minute. Like with Ingress if you attend one of our events, you get an in-game medal that shows up in your profile… It’s an achievement like the achievement you get for walking 1,000 kilometers.
We have achievements in Pokémon. So we could have medals around events in Pokémon. I’m not sure yet.
On how many people Niantic expected to sign up…
JH: We expected tens of millions of users to sign up and create accounts…. Based on our projections, we got, in the first two weeks, somewhere we expected we’d get sometime by the middle of next year.
On whether they did any market research to figure out how big this thing would get…
JH: We didn’t do much research. We had one data point which was Ingress. We had another data point from The Pokémon Company about how many people were in the Pokémon fan club and how many units there game has sold and we looked at those two things and we said we got this set of potential “lapsed users”–Pokémon people that are maybe not actively playing the DS games today but did at one point in time. It was that set of people and a good portion of them we thought would be potential users for this game.
I think we got that set of people, but I also think we got a whole bunch of other people that maybe knew about it through friends, or grew up with it or Pokémon was a cultural touchstone, but wasn’t something that they were deeply into.
On server issues…
JH: The system was built to scale and built to add additional users, but you don’t really know how that’s going to work until you stress the system at those levels of usage. As we started adding more users, we found that certain things broke and had to be repaired quickly. Typically the way it works in a situation like that, you fix something here and that relieves some pressure but then that forces more pressure somewhere else in the system and you have to fix that… We had this cascading set of things where we added more machines and things broke at this level then we fixed them, and things broke at this level then we fixed them, and things broke at this level then we fixed them.
We’re now at a level that we’re at pretty good shape from where things go from here. We were servicing a very large amount of concurrent users.
On the McDonald’s deal and business opportunities…
JH: We incorporated that sponsored location model into Ingress the day it was launched. The idea was to build an alternative to in-app purchase based on idea that in-app purchase exerts a lot of pressure on game design that can lead to games that are not very much fun to play even if they make a lot of money. We kind of caved a little bit when we spun out and added in-app purchases to Ingress and we of course launched Pokémon GO with in-app purchase. My belief is that the sponsored-location model is a better business model for games.
The idea with real world games was to build an advertising model that is deeply tied to the way the game itself works… so it doesn’t break the flow of the game. It doesn’t feel like something is grafted on. That’s what we’re trying to do and it will provide a compliment to in-app purchase. In app-purchase will be the majority of the revenue, but it does take some of the pressure off of us to squeeze hard on the purchase side which would be detrimental to the game.
