Pokemon Go still has plans for several long awaited features, including trading between Pokemon and 1v1 player battles. In a new interview with Verge, Niantic CEO John Hanke discussed his popular game’s first year. During the interview, he confirmed that trading and other features were still in the pipeline.
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During the interview, Hanke admitted that the game’s massive popularity forced his company to divert resources just to keep the servers up and running. “That switched off things like extending gyms, it pushed out things we still want to have, like player-versus-player and trading.”
Because of the shift in priorities, he stated that Pokemon Go was about six months where they thought the game would be.
Hanke also admitted that Pokemon Go‘s initial poor communication was partially because there wasn’t a consensus between Niantic, Nintendo, and the Pokemon Company on how to proceed. The lack of communication really frustrated some players and contributed to the massive exodus of players that occurred towards the end of the first summer.
However, Hanke also stated that communication between game developers and the fanbase had improved and directly led to some of the new features recently added to the game. “The gym badges, the way that whole system works, that’s something that grew out of the dialogue with players,” Hanke told Verge.
Hanke also confirmed that more additions were coming to the gym system, but they wanted to launch the system now to make the gyms more open to all players.
You can check out Verge’s full interview here to see Hanke’s thoughts about the first year and how much time Pokemon Go spends on fighting cheaters.
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