Niantic’s CEO John Hanke announced that Pokemon Go would be coming to China. Niantic is partnering with the Chinese gaming company NetEase to bring the popular mobile game to China nearly 18 months after the game was released to the rest of the world.
China banned Pokemon Go due to its use of Google Maps, which the country perceives as a security risk since Google Maps also includes satellite imagery of military and sensitive areas. Other countries have placed restrictions on Pokemon Go on where and when Pokemon can spawn, but China formally declined to allow Pokemon Go into the country in January 2017. Since then, no Pokemon spawn in the country, nor do any PokeStops or gyms appear at local places of interest.
Oddly enough, there was one incident last year in which a Pokemon Go player traveling in China reported briefly seeing some Pokemon. Back in August, a player discovered a pocket of activity in Taiyuan, China for a handful of hours. Players speculated this might be a test run for a wider release, but Pokemon Go never commented formally on the test nor did it announce any new Chinese plans until today.
NetEase is a Chinese internet and gaming company that maintains online services for games like Hearthstone and World of Warcraft in China. NetEase was one of several companies that invested in Niantic in 2017 and will help Pokemon Go launch in the company later this year. Pokemon Go also abandoned Google Maps in exchange for Open Source Maps in 2017, which likely also helped to ease concerns over the game.
During the interview, Hanke admitted that 2017 had not been as profitable as 2016, even though Pokemon Go still operated at a profit. Hanke expects 2018 to be a much stronger year for the company, in part due to the upcoming release of an AR game based on the world of Harry Potter.
Pokémon Go’s sudden surge in popularity in the summer of 2016, when hundreds of millions of people downloaded the app, “really felt like a SpaceX launch”, he said, referring to Elon Musk’s rocket company.
But, Mr Hanke added, many of those users had stopped playing by the end of the year, leaving a smaller but “solid” community of Pokémon Go gamers who saw more regular updates and new features in 2017. These included real-world weather affecting the virtual gameplay.
“I would say 2017 was about firing the second stage and getting into a stable orbit,” he said, continuing the rocket metaphor. “2018 is about the journey to Mars.”Pokemon Go the most famous AR game of era has seen alot of rising in active player timing since the launch of its Generation 3.And while these updates are set to continue in 2018, it appears that Niantic has a lot of other new ideas for the game.Having seen a list of additional features launched this year, it would seem likely that the development team already have a few projects underway for 2018.
We know that Niantic is trying to work out a way to implement a trading system, as well as add new PvP options to Pokemon Go.When reputed media company recently spoke to members of the team, Niantic developer Matt Slemon spoke about what new things will be added.He mentioned that they’ve been getting ideas from their team, as well as from fan feedback and the Pokemon Company.“We do have a long list of features that we do want to get too eventually,” he explained.“Many are community asks, and a lot of them are team ideas, or suggestions from the Pokemon Company.”
As you can imagine, adding Gen 3 Pokemon from the Ruby and Sapphire games made including the new Weather Effects especially fitting, as those were the first titles where conditions started to play a role in the battle.“Building AR games is at the core of what our company is trying to do, especially with Pokemon Go,” Slemon says.
“As we move forward, We can continue to expect us to choose features that both provide a good tie-in with Augmented Reality, as well as being strong on Pokemon features.”There was no talk of what the next big feature will be, although we can expect that any big updates launched in early 2018 will likely come with a few Gen 3 Pokemon as well.
Niantic recently rolled out a new update that’s sure to help all Pokemon Go Gen 3 trackers.The development team has confirmed plans to release a new wave of Gym and Pokestop locations.This is being done using Niantic’s older AR title, Ingress. Ingress Agents are able to submit new locations via the Operation Portal Recon program.
This also happens to affect Pokemon Go, with Niantic confirming that new locations will be popping up this week.“With the help of Ingress Agents around the world using Operation Portal Recon, we’ve identified interesting new locations to play our games,” a message from the Niantic support team explains.“We’re happy to say that many of these locations will also be added to @PokemonGoApp over the next few days.”
This could prove a huge boost to Gen 3 collectors and Raid players, especially in rural areas.As you can see
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Pokemon Go features like Trading and PvP were delayed because of the Niantic app’s overwhelming launch.Pokemon Go’s popularity meant that Niantic had to rebuild the online infrastructure instead of working on new features. Niantic CEO John Hanke admits that the company is about six months behind schedule.Speaking to The Verge, he said: “We lost probably six months on our schedule because of the success of the game.
“Really all the way through November and December, from launch onward we were rebuilding and rewiring infrastructure just to keep the game running at the scale that we were running at.”We were fortunate to have a massive launch, a massive success, and many, many more users than we had planned for. But we had to redirect a substantial portion of the engineering team to [work on] infrastructure versus new features.”With Niantic recently extending Gym functionality and adding Raids, it looks like other new features won’t be far behind.
“That switched off things like extending….
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