Pokémon Go development lags half a year due to work on infrastructure

Niantic CEO John Hanke says the developer has lost about half a year to infrastructure work. That work was necessary because Pokémon Go quickly became popular. As a result, there was less time to work on new features.

Until December, Niantic was busy getting the infrastructure in order, at which time the work on new functions was therefore on the back burner, says Hanke in an interview with tech site The Verge. At the time, people within Niantic who could have worked on features like trading and player-versus-player were trying to keep the game running.

As a result, the roadmap has been delayed by six months. What’s still going on today is that, due to its popularity, cheating is much more important than in Ingress, a game very similar to Pokémon Go that Niantic released years ago.

Hanke says that because of Ingress Niantic had experience with cheating. “We knew that location spoofing and people making fake clients would be a problem. I don’t think we were prepared for the extent to which people would do that. The game’s success is what made it different from Ingress. offered commercial services to take accounts to higher levels, for example, and those were real companies.” Some of the developers are therefore permanently engaged in removing cheats.

Hanke also indicates in the interview that there will be more changes to the way players should attack gyms. Recently, the gym system has been completely overhauled with a major update, but more changes will follow. The CEO has not yet announced what exactly will be changed.

Pokémon Go came out exactly one year ago. The mobile game caused a lot of hype in the first months. Meanwhile, there are still many people who play the game. Niantic does not disclose how many there are.