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Niantic talks Pokemon GO's future, long-term plans, and 'interesting set of stuff' coming this year
Pokemon GO has come a very long way since it originally launched back in July 2016. Niantic has worked hard to add in requested features, as well as elements fans didn't even know were in the works. After all this time, what's next for the mobile hit? In an interview with Polygon, Niantic product manager Matt Slemon lays out some plans.
“In a lot of ways, we think we’ve hit the point where our original launch trailer promise has been delivered. It’s not entirely delivered — we’re expecting to have iterations, as we mentioned, with the PvP launch to the battle system feature, to allow people to have ways to compete more effectively, or find opponents easier. We expect small iterations to our existing features over time, as well.
But I think as we move forward, we’re going to start to see more features that are less traditional Pokémon features [that are] just sort of one-to-one moved over with the Pokémon Go spin. I think you’re going to see more features that are more about really showing what it means to be an AR real-world game, not just a Pokémon game. I think there will be an interesting set of stuff that we have for fans this year, and we’re excited to get that out there.
We try to stay as agile as we can. We generally have longer-term plans, but the further out something is, the more it is subject to change. The goal is that we want to stay responsive: We don’t want to get locked in a situation where we’re committed to delivering something that’s no longer the right thing to deliver. Or an opportunity has appeared, either a cool piece of tech or a good suggestion internally has surfaced, and we want to be able to do it, but the timeline is inflexible.
We do look out to around five years, and we sort of have a long-term vision for what we’d like the game to look like in five years, but we are very open still to finding better ideas along the way and pivoting the roadmap as necessary.”