It has been downloaded more than 650 million times, has received awards from the video games industry (The Game Awards, DICE Awards) and the mobile industry (Glomo Awards), and earned millions of dollars for The Pokémon Company and Niantic Labs in the process. And you know what? This game's not even finished yet.
John Hanke, CEO at Niantic Labs, told Wired.de that there are some areas of the game "released in an incomplete state". There are two that will be improved sooner or later, "playing together and gym battles", because "we knew from Ingress that cooperation and planning can be a lot of fun.
"When people have a common goal, then that's a strong incentive to meet up with friends or even with people you don't know. The gameplay in gym battles is very limited. They just don't work as well as we wish they would. We will overhaul this aspect of the game to ensure more teamwork and to give people a bigger incentive to receive the rewards from gym battles."
The problem is that Niantic didn't have the money required for this development. Hanke explained that the company had 35 million dollars of funding after leaving Google to sustain their business and develop Pokémon Go.
"We had a fairly large team and a relatively short amount of time. We worked a long time on it and eventually that just exhausts people", he said.
Pokémon Go received a big update earlier this year with 80 new pokémon, a new shop with items to dress characters, and a remodelled user interface. There are still two big updates planned for 2017, but Niantic is still working out what to introduce in them. After all, people are still wanting the PvP battles that were shown in the first trailer.
Thanks to Nintendo Everything for the translation.