It was a year ago that Pokemon GO began to roll out around the world. The game was so popular that Niantic was not able to simply make it available to every country at the same time. So it was available to most countries in the beginning of July and the rollout continued from there. Niantic’s biggest issue with Pokemon GO was indeed the amount of users attempting to play the game. Which led Niantic to needing to add more servers and adjust for the amount of users playing the game. This pushed back a number of features the company wanted to roll out, and thus made many users stop playing the game.
Now, a year later, the game is still somewhat popular, but not at the unprecedented heights it was when it launched. Niantic’s CEO, John Hanke, gave an interview to The Verge, and talked about what future plans the company has for the game and if he was happy with Pokemon GO. Hanke was asked if Pokemon GO was close to the original roadmap the company had for it, and unsurprisingly, Hanke said that they lost about 6 months due to how popular the game was. The company was working on capacity with its servers all the way through til November or December, according to Hanke. He did note that Niantic could have prepared more for the launch, but there was still no way of knowing just how popular the game was going to be.
When it comes to cheating, Niantic is actually using resources that would otherwise be allocated to building out features and such, towards curbing those cheaters out there. Hanke noted that the team did have some experience dealing with cheaters through Ingress. But Ingress never became as popular as Pokemon GO had been. In fact, there were companies that were popping up, helping users quickly level up in Pokemon GO, that never happened with Ingress. Hanke did also say in this interview that Niantic has plenty of things coming in the pipeline for Pokemon GO, including PvP (Player vs Player) as well as trading. But Hanke is the most proud of their recent update, raiding gyms. As it was the first to really incorporate new mechanics into the game.