It’s no secret that the Pokemon Go playerbase has been falling off since its summer pinnacle, and if you dig around on Reddit or follow the patch news of the last few months, you get the sense that its problems go beyond the normal ebb and flow of game popularity. Indeed, Niantic has seemed to relish in making Pokemon Go less accessible every patch, banning even non-cheat third party tools, blocking millions of people who jailbreak and root their mobile devices, and effectively telling commuters and passengers to go play — and spend money on — something else.
In a new interview with Eurogamer, Niantic chief marketing officer Mike Quigley acknowledged and then dismissed the messes created in the last few months. “The fire-fighting has ceased,” he told the blog. “Now, we can get back to developing core features.” He says that headlines about Pokemon’s struggles are “just noise” and that it’s “listening to the community.” And then, he comes right out and says the team thinks of and works on the game as an MMO.
“[W]e are more an MMO than anything else. We have two week client sprints, two week server-side sprints. Every two weeks there’s new content or bug fixes going in the game. There’s key content releases we’re planning. […] I think our lifespan and curve may be quite different from a free-to-play mobile game – it may be more in a [World of] Warcraft vein just because of the type of game we are. It’s not about taking a bunch of money off the table and going. Monetisation has never been the focus for us. It’s about doing right by the brand and doing right by the fans.”
