In Pokémon GO, helper apps for tracking like Poké Radar might soon come to an end.
The CEO of Niantic, John Hanke, had an appointment with the business magazine Forbes for a conversation.
In the interview with the magazine, Hanke spoke about various apps and issues with Pokémon GO. He finds methods players use to speed up hatching eggs rather creative and funny – such as someone using a model train to hatch the eggs.
Hanke has no problems with that. The player is only cheating himself. Hanke has also seen someone using a turntable to hatch eggs. That seems to amuse him quite a bit.
Apps like Poké Radar might soon stop working
It’s different with apps like “Poké Radar”, which shows players where Pokémon spawn. Hanke doesn’t like that. He is not a fan of it. At the moment, they have other things to do, but it might happen in the future that these apps no longer work, he says.
They take the fun out of the game. People would try to hack data from Niantic’s system. That is against the rules. As an online game, you have to take action against such things. World of Warcraft also did that.
In order for Pokémon GO to work in the long term and also do justice to the team aspect, one must take action against cheating and this “spoofing”.
Interesting: Hanke did not mention the “Nearby Bug”. That is what made such tracking apps popular. In the meantime, they have completely removed the “footprint” feature:
The Future of the Game: Stable Servers, Sponsor Deals, Poké Events
Further statements Hanke made, in a quick overview:
New Pokémon for Events
For certain events, they want to make special Pokémon appear, perhaps also providing players with achievements, trophies, and successes. At first, Niantic thought they would organize these events themselves. Now they believe it is better to simply support the events that others organize. However, they have no secret plan, but are working on it and crafting these things until the moment they actually go live.
Pokémon GO servers should now run stably
The server problems that Pokémon GO experienced were due to the huge influx of players, Hanke explains. When certain thresholds were reached and exceeded, things simply collapsed and had to be repaired. The problem is that if you repair something at one point and relieve the pressure from that point, the traffic pressure redistributes elsewhere and something breaks there. They had to deal with a lot of simultaneous users.
But now they are in a good position.
Retail locations want to become PokéStops
Regarding the sponsor deal with McDonald’s and further financial potential through “real-world” deals, Hanke remains rather reserved: Companies can turn their businesses into “sponsored locations” and thus become more attractive to players of Pokémon GO.
This “sponsor model” should be a “parallel funding model” that they actually believed was better because it allows for a different, free game design. However, in Ingress, the predecessor game to Pokémon GO, they deviated from that and relied on the “classic model” with in-app purchases to generate revenue – the option for “sponsored locations” is also available in Pokémon GO.
With the “sponsored location” model, if executed properly, the game flow would not be interrupted, Hanke explains. The “sponsored” model relieves pressure on developers to force in-game purchases to earn more money. That could come at the expense of fun in the game.
Requests from companies to make their stores “PokéStops” are extremely frequent with Pokémon GO. They have been bombarded with such requests.
The Pokémon GO app fulfilled a promise in the summer of 2016 that we were given as children. Instead of controlling a trainer, we can now be a Pokémon trainer o...
