It’d be hard to argue that Pokemon Go was anything other than a resounding success when it landed on app stores earlier this year.
In fact, Niantic’s augmented reality Pokemon sim, which saw players take to the streets in droves in search of pocket monsters, was perhaps too successful.
Servers buckled under the weight of fervent fans, and Niantic was forced to spent weeks slowly rolling out the game across the world, patching up their systems as they went in order to cope with that unprecedented demand.
Those troubles, though, are in the past. And in a recent interview with Eurogamer, Niantic’s chief marketing officer Mike Quigley spoke about his World of Warcraft-sized ambitions for the game now the player-count has leveled off.
For Quiqley, comparing Pokemon Go to other mobile games is an exercise in futility. Niantic’s baby, he explains, is “more of an MMO than anything else.” It has two week client sprints, two week server-side sprints, and bi-weekly content patches and bug fixes.
In that sense it’s a unique beast, which is exactly why the studio hopes to play the long game, much like Blizzard’s seemingly eternal MMO.
“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,” says Quigley.
“It’s not about taking a bunch of money off the table and going. Monetization has never been the focus for us. It’s about doing right by the brand and doing right by the fans.”
To hear more from Quigley, check out the full interview over on Eurogamer.
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2016