Back when Niantic Labs originally released Pokemon GO in early July, the Californian studio’s latest title quickly took off and became one of the highest-grossing mobile games ever created. In the following months, the San Francisco-based developer was mostly focused on rolling out Pokemon GO in as many regions as possible while simultaneously keeping the game’s servers up and running. These days, the augmented reality mobile game is available in most parts of the world, but a good portion of its player base has abandoned it in the meantime.
Given that turn of events, one could say that Pokemon GO is a victim of its own success. Due to the initial player demand which even crushed Niantic’s wildest ambitions, the San Francisco-based studio spent the early post-launch period trying to make the game playable instead of delivering bi-weekly updates which would add content and features to the game, like it was originally promised. Now, when you make an accessible mobile game that’s casual in nature, new content is the only way you can reliably keep players engaged over time. Niantic isn’t a huge studio with limitless resources, so initial post-launch issues prevented the company from delivering regular content updates. Well, after almost five months on the market, things are finally looking up.
While Pokemon GO lost a significant portion of its user base, Niantic is now finally focused on crafting new content and gameplay elements which players can enjoy. In addition to a buddy system, balancing changes, in-game events, player rewards, and an overhaul of gym-taking mechanics, the Californian firm is reportedly also getting ready to bring the second generation of pocket monsters to Pokemon GO by the end of the year. In other words, content changes that were promised are finally rolling out on a somewhat regular basis. Now, time will tell whether that will be enough to win back tens of millions of players who have abandoned this AR mobile game over the summer. The fact that Pokemon trading and player-versus-player battles still haven’t made their way to the game certainly isn’t great, but by most accounts, Niantic is working hard to implement them.