Niantic

Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in Mobile, News | 4 Comments

Niantic CEO John Hanke is teasing a secret hidden within Pokemon GO.

“There will always be secrets in the game that no one has found because we’re always adding new secrets to the game,” Hanke told GamesRadar. “There’s one out there right now and we’ll see how that plays out over the course of the next few weeks.”

Sadly, Hanke didn’t elaborate any further. GamesRadar asked if what he was referring to stems from the Halloween update, but Hanke responding by stating: “I am not giving you any clues.”

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Posted on 8 years ago by Matt(@OnePunchMaz) in Mobile, News | 0 comments

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.”

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Posted on 8 years ago by Matt(@OnePunchMaz) in Mobile, News | 3 Comments

gameindustry.biz published an interview today with Mike Quigley, the chief marketing officer at Niantic. Naturally, the interview centered around Pokemon GO, Niantic’s biggest success so far. You can read the full interview here; below are a couple of interesting tidbits:

On how real-life seasons and weather affect a game like Pokemon GO:

“We’ll monitor this stuff, and come this time next year, we might start to think about doing things for the likes of Germany, the UK and North America, who are going through their winter.”

“A lot of people give us credit for the summer release timing, but we also saw strong pick-ups in places like Australia and Brazil, when it was winter for them. There’s a lot of seasonal dynamics we need to consider. It’s a variable that most developers don’t need to worry about. Hopefully we can learn and figure out ways to keep consumers engaged. Maybe there will be other spikes in corresponding glove and hat and coat sales.

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Posted on 8 years ago by Zack in Mobile, News | 0 comments

A new update for Pokemon GO is “rolling out right now” according to the Pokemon GO site.

The update will add the daily bonus system to Pokemon GO, which will reward players for catching a Pokemon and visiting a PokeStop each day. Repeating this each day will net you further rewards. Additionally, Niantic has said that Pokemon spawn rates will be higher until November 11, alongside extra items being given out at PokeStop. The Pokemon GO Twitter released this helpful picture in a tweet to explain the daily bonus system.

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Posted on 8 years ago by Matt(@OnePunchMaz) in Mobile, News | 15 Comments

Pokemon GO’s latest update has begun rolling out, and it seems like there’s more than just the officially documented changes in it. Data miners at The Silph Road discovered data for 100 new Pokemon in the update – everything from Chikorita to Celebi, i.e. the whole of generation 2. Moveset data for these Pokemon seems to not have been added yet.

That’s not all, though – data for Ditto and its signature move, Transform, has also been found in the update.

Of course, keep in mind that this is all just datamined info at this point – these new Pokemon are not available in the actual game yet, and all of this info is subject to change.

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Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in Mobile, News | 9 Comments

Niantic is getting the ball rolling on a new Pokemon GO update. The app is being updated to version 1.15.0 on iOS, and version 0.45.0 on Android.

The new Pokemon GO update encompasses three main areas. First, as we heard about recently, daily bonuses are coming to Pokemon GO. Also, when defeating a Gym Leader, a brief period will be in place in which only you can place a Pokemon in the open Gym. Finally, the amount of Prestige a rival Gym loses when you defeat a regular Gym member has increased while the amount of Prestige gained by training at a friendly Gym has been lowered.

Read up on Niantic’s official message after the break.

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Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in Mobile, News | 7 Comments

Update: Niantic has further clarified the situation with a tweet, stating that in addition to Eevee being limited to five-kilometer eggs, players will no longer recieve Rattata or Pidgey from their hatched eggs. Furthermore, players will find different Pokemon where Zubat, Rattata and Pidgey were commonly found prior to this update.

Original: Niantic recently made a change to Pokemon GO which is going over very well within the community. In the past, Eevee was a part of the random rotation of Pokemon that could be inside the 10-kilometer egg. Now, however, the Pokemon hatches out of a five-kilometer egg.

It takes quite a bit of work to earn a 10-kilometer egg. After hatching it and learning that Eevee was inside, some players ended up being disappointed as it’s a fairly common creature. With the update, it takes half as many steps to possibly hatch an Eevee or another less rare Pokemon on the same egg tier.

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Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in Mobile, News | 3 Comments

The Verge recently spoke with Niantic’s Dennis Hwang, who was previously in charge of designing Google Doodles. Much of the conversation revolved around Pokemon GO.

At one point, Hwang was asked if he considers the game to be a social network. His response was as follows:

“I think we would like for it to be. That’s kind of part of the way we envision our platform, is really bringing people together. It’s not really about the specific game title or mobile phone app, it’s how do you create a shared experience that brings people together. So for Ingress, when we did start seeing boyfriend / girlfriend, husband / wife, people who are having kids after meeting each other playing our game, it was super satisfying and we were overjoyed to see that actually happening.

We’re sort of trying to paint an optimistic future, where technology is really bringing people together, not like you’re strapping a screen in a dark place to your face, where every interaction becomes through a camera, through a computer, through a network — that seems a little too dystopian to us. So we’re trying to see if there’s a better way to do things.”

Hwang later took on a question about Pokemon GO’s design and whether he’d change anything. This prompted him to speak about wanting to incorporate “more heads-up play.” Niantic wants players looking less at their phones rather than more.

Hwang said:

“Oh, there’s a lot that isn’t perfect. We had a pretty tight timeline to build this. I think just generally speaking the biggest element we’re looking to improve is allowing more heads-up play. It saddens me a little bit when I see a lot of hunched over people outside. They’re having fun, they’re outside in a great public park, but we’re always wanting a little more direct engagement with our immediate surroundings. So those are design choices we’re looking at carefully to keep improving it.

Like let’s say in the current interface, some of the information about a pokémon that spawned is in fine detail and the icon is really small. It’s going to make you go closer to the screen. We may just iterate on the design until you feel like the information is being presented to you in a way where you’re not having to stick your nose on the screen. It could be a simple size change, or the way the notification is animated, or it could be auditory cues instead of visual cues. There are a lot of options we’re going to explore.”

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Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in Mobile, News | 3 Comments

Pokemon GO fans recently found evidence of a new planned feature via data mining: daily bonuses. Today, Niantic confirmed that the functionality is on the way, and also shared first details.

Players who catch Pokemon every day will receive a pair of bonuses. Additionally, you’ll get a larger bonus for catching Pokemon seven days in a row. Bonuses are also planned for those who visit a PokeStop and spin the Photo Disc every day as well as for a seven day streak.

By catching a Pokemon at any time on Tuesday local time, you’ll be eligible for the next daily bonus on Wednesday at 12 AM local time.

Full details about the different bonuses can be found after the break.

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Posted on 8 years ago by Zack in Mobile, News | 21 Comments

Pokemon GO has been a runaway success for Niantic and the Pokemon Company, but it seems its wild popularity is dwindling – at least compared to other mobile game titans.

A collection of data regarding Pokemon GO and its overall decline in revenue has been posted on the Survey Monkey Intelligence blog, detailing how steep the decline in revenue is. During it’s peak month of July and some time afterwards, Pokemon GO was the most profitable mobile game by a very wide margin. However, its revenue generation has shrunk to levels that are more comparable to other mobile games, such as Mobile Strike, Game of War and Clash Royale. In the blog post, its mentioned that the revenue generation of Pokemon GO has fallen to a level that puts it on par with Candy Crush Saga. Furthermore, the author believes that this downward trend will continue to a certain degree:

October saw Pokémon GO’s daily revenues fall below those of Game of War, Mobile Strike, and Clash Royale, who are now vying for the top grossing game spot.

Pokémon GO’s revenue stats on U.S. smartphones have put it essentially on par with Candy Crush Saga… for the moment. (We expect Pokémon GO revenues will keep falling to some degree.)

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