Niantic CEO on Pokémon GO cheaters, what's next for the game

A portion of a Forbes interview with Niantic Labs CEO John Hanke...

F: How do you feel about the people that are trying to cheat the game? I saw a guy 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.

F: What about the guy in New York that said he caught all the available in his area?

JH: Yeah, I saw that. We were speculating on it–is this guy cheating? I’m not sure what the final conclusion was.

F: How do you feel about Poké 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.

F: So everybody is wondering: What do you add to the game later that brings people back if you 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.