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After community backlash, Pokémon GO reinstates a COVID safety and accessibility feature
Pokémon GO announced yesterday that it will permanently keep an in-game feature that made the game easier to play while social distancing. Introduced at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the feature doubled the interaction radius around key augmented reality landmarks that are essential to gameplay. Though Niantic — parent company to Pokémon GO — removed the feature earlier this month, it chose to permanently reinstate it after weeks of community- and creator-led backlash.
Pre-pandemic, Pokémon GO players needed to be within 40 meters of a PokéStop or Gym to interact with it, but with the now-permanent change, the radius is expanded to 80 meters. Incidentally, players with disabilities found that this feature made the game more accessible to people with limited mobility. As one of the first mainstream AR mobile games, Pokémon GO is virtually unplayable if you’re unable to travel to real-world landmarks like PokéStops and Gyms — so allowing users to interact with these landmarks from farther away (for example, if a wheelchair-user can’t journey off of a paved sidewalk) opened the game up to new players.
Because Pokémon GO has long positioned itself as a game that encourages real-world exploration, worldwide lockdowns posed a unique challenge for Niantic. But by making some small changes — like expanding the interaction radius by just 40 meters, increasing Pokémon spawns and making it easier to obtain more PokéBalls — the game became easier to play from home.
These changes didn’t break the game or contradict its adventurous spirit, which made the rollback of a well-loved upgrade confusing for players, especially in light of the spreading Delta variant. From a financial standpoint, the app thrived during the pandemic. In 2020, Pokémon GO had its best-earning year since its launch in 2016, earning over $1 billion. According to app analytics firm Sensor Tower, this upward trend continued for Pokémon GO in the first half of 2021, with $642 million. This marked a 34% increase in consumer spending compared to the first half of 2020, when it made $479 million.
Dear @NianticLabs your community needs you to address the recent in-game changes to #PokemonGO. #HearUsNiantic we love this game and the communities we’ve built together. This game thrives on inclusivity and diversity. Show us you understand that. pic.twitter.com/1N6EAaM5m2
— ZoëTwoDots
(@_ZoeTwoDots) August 5, 2021
After Niantic reduced the interaction radius, Pokémon GO content creators and community members worked together to write an open letter to Niantic, which caused the hashtag #HearUsNiantic to trend on Twitter. The letter expressed that the increased radius made the game safer, more accessible and less intrusive.
Some players organized a boycott of the game on August 5th, which was referred to as “Pokémon No Day.” That same day, Niantic issued a response letter addressed to the Pokémon GO community.
“Encouraging people to explore, exercise and safely play together in person remains Niantic’s mission. The health and wellbeing of players is our top priority,” Niantic’s statement read. The company formed an “inter cross-functional team” to address these concerns and invited prominent Pokémon GO content creators to share community feedback. While expanding the interaction radius is the first result of the task force, Pokémon GO tweeted that it will share more findings on September 1.
TechCrunch asked Niantic why it initially chose to rebuke these gameplay updates despite positive community feedback, increased revenue and an ongoing pandemic, but Niantic declined to comment.
Despite players’ visible negative response on social media, Sensor Tower told TechCrunch that it didn’t see any change in consumer spending or active users for Pokémon GO around the time of the in-game strike. However, there was a significant uptick in negative App Store reviews.
Though the wider interaction radius is now reinstated, some players remain frustrated, since community leaders had previously provided this feedback in June after Niantic announced its plans to roll back these changes.
“Why did it have to take this giant community movement for any of our feedback to be heard?” said creator ZoëTwoDots in a YouTube video.
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Niantic acquires 3D scanning app Scaniverse
Niantic continues to push forward in its quest to build a 3D map of the world.
This morning the company announced that it has acquired Scaniverse, an iPhone/iPad app for scanning objects and environments in high-resolution 3D.
A rep for Niantic tells me that Scaniverse will remain on the App Store, with plans to continue supporting it as a standalone app. Features previously limited to a $17-per-year “Pro” subscription, including higher-resolution processing and support for exporting models to other 3D software, will now be free.
As I first wrote about years ago, one of Niantic’s goals is to build a detailed and endlessly-evolving 3D map of the world — a step they see as fundamental to enabling true, rich augmented reality experiences if/when the world ever embraces something like AR glasses. It’s a rather massive (and never-ending) task, but one made a bit more feasible by way of its ever-roaming player base across games like Pokémon GO, Harry Potter Wizards Unite and Ingress.
As part of the deal, Scaniverse creator Keith Ito will be joining Niantic’s AR team. The company declined to outline any other terms of the acquisition. This is Niantic’s latest acquisition in the 3D mapping space, having acquired 6D.ai for an undisclosed sum in early 2020.
For context, here’s a demo of the Scaniverse app doing its thing:
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Niantic is working with Hasbro on a Pokémon GO-style Transformers game
Niantic has encouraged the world to roam the streets as Pokémon trainers and wizards… next up? Time to transform and roll out.
Eighties mega toy Transformers is the latest IP to partner with Niantic to build a map-heavy, geolocation-centric game.
Details are still a bit light, but here’s just about everything we know:
- It’ll be called Transformers: Heavy Metal. They’ve put up a pre-registration page here.
- It’s being built in collaboration with Hasbro, TOMY and Seattle game team Very Very Spaceship.
- Players will be a part of the “Guardian Network,” according to the announcement, “a group of humans who have banded together with the Autobots in a war against the Decepticons.”
- It’s built on Niantic’s Lightship platform, the same underlying engine that powers Pokémon GO, Harry Potter Wizards Unite and the still in-development Catan: World Explorers.
- When’s it arriving? Nothing too specific yet, but it’ll launch in “select markets” soon, and then globally “later this year.” This staged rollout tends to be Niantic’s approach; Pokémon GO landed first in Japan, while Catan was quietly rolled out in New Zealand last year.
They’ve only released a bit of concept art so far, and it suggests gameplay not unlike GO and Wizards Unite. That battle screen on the right definitely looks a whole lot like a Pokémon GO battle:
Image Credits: Niantic
Will this one take over the world the way Pokémon GO did in the summer of 2016? Maybe not — that one hit a lot of the right notes at the right time, the perfect blend of novelty and nostalgia. But Wizards Unite has found enough of an audience that it’s still in active development two years after launch, so it seems Niantic sees room for more map-centric games. A rep for Niantic mentioned this being one of 10 real-world titles that the company currently has in development, suggesting that they see lots of room there.
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Niantic buys competitive gaming platform Mayhem
Pokémon GO creator Niantic has acquired a small SF gaming startup building a league and tournament organization platform to help gamers create their own communities around popular titles.
Mayhem was in Y Combinator’s winter 2018 batch and went on to raise $5.7 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. Other backers include Accel, which led the startup’s Series A in 2018, Afore Capital and NextGen Venture Partners.
The startup’s focus has shifted quite a bit since its initial YC debut, when it announced a service called Visor that would analyze video of esports gameplay and coach users on how they could improve their performance. The company has seemed to shift its focus wholly to community tools to help gamers find matches and organize tournaments for games like Overwatch on its platform.
Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed by Niantic .
The “majority” of Mayhem’s team will be joining Niantic with the startup’s CEO Ivan Zhou landing in the company’s Social Platform Product team while the rest of the team joins Platform Engineering.
In a statement, Niantic asserts that the acquisition “reinforces our commitment to real-world social as the centerpiece of our mission.”
Most of Niantic’s acquisitions of late have focused on augmented reality backend technologies, so it’s interesting to see them buying tech that focuses on community organization.
Pokémon GO continues to be Niantic’s cash cow, though the company hasn’t seen the same levels of viral success with subsequent releases where organic growth hasn’t been quite as easy to come by. Buying a startup building community tools suggests the company is ready to bring in some outside tech to push their own efforts forward as they strive to create a broader platform for their AR ambitions and more standalone hits of their own.
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How Niantic evolved Pokémon GO for the year no one could go anywhere
Pokémon GO was created to encourage players to explore the world while coordinating impromptu large group gatherings — activities we’ve all been encouraged to avoid since the pandemic began.
And yet, analysts estimate that 2020 was Pokémon GO’s highest-earning year yet.
By twisting some knobs and tweaking variables, Pokémon GO became much easier to play without leaving the house.
Niantic’s approach to 2020 was full of carefully considered changes, and I’ve highlighted many of their key decisions below.
Consider this something of an addendum to the Niantic EC-1 I wrote last year, where I outlined things like the company’s beginnings as a side project within Google, how Pokémon Go began as an April Fools’ joke and the company’s aim to build the platform that powers the AR headsets of the future.
Hit the brakes
On a press call outlining an update Niantic shipped in November, the company put it on no uncertain terms: the roadmap they’d followed over the last ten-or-so months was not the one they started the year with. Their original roadmap included a handful of new features that have yet to see the light of day. They declined to say what those features were of course (presumably because they still hope to launch them once the world is less broken) — but they just didn’t make sense to release right now.
Instead, as any potential end date for the pandemic slipped further into the horizon, the team refocused in Q1 2020 on figuring out ways to adapt what already worked and adjust existing gameplay to let players do more while going out less.
Turning the dials
As its name indicates, GO was never meant to be played while sitting at home. John Hanke’s initial vision for Niantic was focused around finding ways to get people outside and playing together; from its very first prototype, Niantic had players running around a city to take over its virtual equivalent block by block. They’d spent nearly a decade building up a database of real-world locations that would act as in-game points meant to encourage exploration and wandering. Years of development effort went into turning Pokémon GO into more and more of a social game, requiring teamwork and sometimes even flash mob-like meetups for its biggest challenges.
Now it all needed to work from the player’s couch.
The earliest changes were those that were easiest for Niantic to make on-the-fly, but they had dramatic impacts on the way the game actually works.
Some of the changes:
- Doubling the players “radius” for interacting with in-game gyms, landmarks that players can temporarily take over for their in-game team, earning occupants a bit of in-game currency based on how long they maintain control. This change let more gym battles happen from the couch.
- Increasing spawn points, generally upping the number of Pokémon you could find at home dramatically.
- Increasing “incense” effectiveness, which allowed players to use a premium item to encourage even more Pokémon to pop up at home. Niantic phased this change out in October, then quietly reintroduced it in late November. Incense would also last twice as long, making it cheaper for players to use.
- Allowing steps taken indoors (read: on treadmills) to count toward in-game distance challenges.
- Players would no longer need to walk long distances to earn entry into the online player-versus-player battle system.
- Your “buddy” Pokémon (a specially designated Pokémon that you can level up Tamagotchi-style for bonus perks) would now bring you more gifts of items you’d need to play. Pre-pandemic, getting these items meant wandering to the nearby “Pokéstop” landmarks.
By twisting some knobs and tweaking variables, Pokémon GO became much easier to play without leaving the house — but, importantly, these changes avoided anything that might break the game while being just as easy to reverse once it became safe to do so.
GO Fest goes virtual
Like this, just … online. Image Credits: Greg Kumparak
Thrown by Niantic every year since 2017, GO Fest is meant to be an ultra-concentrated version of the Pokémon GO experience. Thousands of players cram into one park, coming together to tackle challenges and capture previously unreleased Pokémon.
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Pokémon GO will bump its max level cap to 50 and add more Pokémon soon
Since launching four years ago, hitting level 40 in Pokémon GO meant hitting the top. You could still keep catching Pokémon and gathering XP, of course — but that shiny level badge wasn’t going up any higher.
That’ll change later this month with an update that bumps the cap to 50, introduces new Pokémon and makes other gameplay tweaks.
Here’s what’s changing:
- New level cap: Starting November 30th, the max level in Pokémon GO will now be 50. Niantic tells me that XP you’ve already accumulated beyond what’s required for Level 40 will count toward new levels. However, there’s more to levels 41-50 than just XP; each new level comes with a set of challenges you must complete, such as completing 100 Field Research tasks or hatching 30 eggs — so no one will be hitting the new cap immediately. Some ultra-dedicated players have accumulated XP many, many times past what’s needed to hit 40, so this twist makes sense.
- XP system overhaul: Niantic is adjusting how much XP players get for things like catching Pokémon, hatching eggs, etc., primarily to make getting to level 40 a bit less of a grind. Anyone who hits Level 40 before the end of the year will get some special stuff, including an exclusive Gyarados hat for their avatar and a “Legacy 40” medal.
- New Pokémon: A new generation of Pokémon — those from the “Kalos” region originally featured in Pokémon X and Y — will start appearing on December 2nd.
- Seasons: Niantic is introducing the concept of “seasons” to the game. Seasons will change every three months based on which hemisphere you’re in, and determine things like which Pokémon you see and which forms certain Pokémon will take. In-game events will now be themed around each season; the in-game player-versus-player battle league, meanwhile, will now be three months long and tied to the same schedule.
Niantic is giving this update a big flashy name for the first time, dubbing it “Pokémon GO Beyond.” It’s the biggest update the game has seen in a long while — definitely the biggest this year.
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Unity’s IPO numbers look pretty … unreal?
Unity, the company founded in a Copenhagen apartment in 2004, is poised for an initial public offering with numbers that look pretty strong.
Even as its main competitor, Epic Games, is in the throes of a very public fight with Apple over the fees the computer giant charges developers who sell applications (including games) on its platform (which has seen Epic’s games get the boot from the App Store), Unity has plowed ahead, narrowing its losses and maintaining its hold on over half of the game development market.
For the first six months of 2020, the company lost $54.2 million on $351.3 million in revenue. The company narrowed its losses compared to 2019, when the company lost $163.2 million on $541.8 million in revenue, and 2018 when the company lost $131.6 million on $380.8 million in revenue. As of June 30, 2020 the company had total assets of $1.29 billion and $453.2 million in cash.
Increasing revenue and narrowing losses are things that investors like to see in companies that they’re potentially going to invest in, as they point to a path to profitability. Another sign of the company’s success is the number of customers that contribute more than $100,000 in annual revenue. In the first six month of the year, Unity had 716 such customers, pointing to the health of its platform.
The company will trade on the NYSE under the single-letter ticker “U”. The NYSE only has a few single letters left to offer, although Pandora gave up the letter P when it was bought by Liberty Media back in 2018.
Unlike Epic Games, Unity has long worked with the major platforms and gaming companies to get their engine in front of as many developers and gamers as possible. In fact, the company estimates that 53% of the top 1,000 mobile games on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store and over 50% of mobile, personal computer and console games were made with Unity.
Some of the top titles that the platform claims include Nintendo’s Mario Kart: Tour, Super Mario Run and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp; Niantic’s Pokémon GO and Activision’s recent Call of Duty: Mobile are also Unity games.
The knock against Unity is that it’s not as powerful as Epic’s Unreal rendering engine, but that hasn’t stopped the company from making forays into industries beyond gaming — something that it will need to continue doing if it’s to be successful.
Unity already has a toehold in Hollywood, where it was used to recreate the jungle environment used in Disney’s “Lion King” remake (meanwhile, much of “The Mandalorian” was created using Epic’s Unreal engine).
Of course, Unity’s numbers also reveal that the size of its business is currently a bit smaller than its biggest rival. In 2019, Epic said it had earnings of $730 million on revenue of $4.2 billion, according to VentureBeat . And the North Carolina-based game developer is now worth $17.3 billion.
Still, the games market is likely big enough for both companies to thrive. “Historically there has been substantial industry convergence in the games developer tools business, but over the past decade the number of developers has increased so much, I believe the market can support two major players,” Piers Harding-Rolls, games analyst at Ampere Analysis, told the Financial Times.
Venture investors in the Unity platform have waited a long time for this moment, and they’re certainly confident in the company’s prospects.
The last investment round valued the company at $6 billion, with the secondary sale of $525 million worth of the company’s shares.
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CRV’s Saar Gur wants to invest in a new wave of games built for VR, Twitch and Zoom
Saar Gur is adept at identifying the next big consumer trends earlier than most: The San Francisco-based general partner at CRV has led investments into leading consumer internet companies like Niantic, DoorDash, Bird, Dropbox, Patreon, Kapwing and ClassPass.
His own experience stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic spurred his interest in three new investment themes focused on the next generation of games: those built for VR, those built on top of Twitch and those built for video chat environments as a socializing tool.
TechCrunch: We’ve been in a “VR winter,” as it’s been called in the industry, following the 2014-2017 wave of VC funding into VR drying up as the market failed to gain massive consumer adoption. You think VR could soon be hot again. Why?
Saar Gur: If you track revenues of third-party games on Oculus, the numbers are getting interesting. And we think the Quest is not quite the Xbox moment for Facebook, but the device and market response to the Quest have been great. So we are more engaged in looking at VR gaming startups than ever before.
What do you mean by “the Xbox moment,” and what will that look like for VR? Facebook hasn’t been able to keep up with demand for Oculus Quest headsets, and most VR headsets seem to have sold out during this pandemic as people seek entertainment at home. This seems like progress. When will we cross the threshold?
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Niantic will make Pokémon GO more stay-at-home friendly with remote raids
Pokémon GO was built to be played outside, with friends, as you wandered around and explored interesting landmarks around you — or, you know, the exact opposite of what we’re supposed to be doing right now.
Niantic has been working on transitioning the game into something that can still be played from your couch (Pokémon StayTheHellAtHome, if you will), and today it detailed one of the bigger upcoming changes: remote raids.
Raids, first introduced in 2017, allow players to band together to take down massive, super-strong and often quite rare Pokémon. If the group wins, everyone gets the chance to catch the Pokémon.
Up until this point, raiding meant going to a specific location at a specific time to meet with up to 19 other players. That idea… doesn’t really work anymore. Thus, remote raids!
Here’s how it’ll work:
- Once the change goes live in the coming days, you’ll be able to join any raid you can see on your “nearby” screen. You won’t actually have to go to the location, just be close enough for the game to show it to you (a few blocks away, generally.)
- For achievements/tasks/etc., remote raids will count the same as standard raids.
- Taking part in a remote raid will require a remote raid pass which, of course, will be a premium item. They’ll cost 100 Pokécoins each when bought individually, or about a dollar.
- At first, remote raiders will be just as strong as those actually on-site. It sounds like as the need for remote raids goes away (that is, presumably, once shelter-in-place orders are eventually relaxed), remote raiders will still be welcome but won’t do as much damage as those on location.
- Eventually, Niantic says they’ll allow you to invite friends to raids regardless of where they are. Need an assist from a friend who is miles away? Hop into the raid, then invite them.
Niantic also mentioned that they’ll be giving each player one daily stay-at-home-centric “Field Research” task, and that Buddy Pokémon will now bring you item-packed gift boxes to send to friends rather than requiring you to visit Pokéstops. Items, meanwhile, will now be stackable in their duration. Know you want incense drawing Pokémon to your location for the next two hours but don’t want to have to remember to fire one off every 30 minutes? Trigger four at once, and they’ll stack.
Niantic hasn’t given a specific time frame for when remote raids will roll out, saying only that they’re “coming soon.”
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Niantic is updating Pokémon GO and other titles to support indoor gaming
Niantic, the development company behind popular AR mobile games Pokémon GO and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, is adapting its titles to support at-home gaming in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Typically, Niantic’s games have encouraged people to go outdoors, explore their world and connect with others in real life as they played. But with government lockdowns and home quarantines under way, it’s no longer safe to play these games as originally intended.
The company says it will now prioritize making changes to its AR titles to allow people to play inside and around their own homes.
For example, Niantic’s Adventure Sync function will now track your indoor steps as you do things like run on a treadmill, clean your house or make other indoor movements and activities. It’s also enhancing the games’ social features to allow friends to stay in touch virtually, and soon take on Raid Battles together while staying at home.
Instead of discouraging virtual movement inside the game, as Niantic has in the past, players will be able to virtually visit and share memories about their favorite real-world places. And this summer, Niantic will re-imagine its plans for live events to allow players to participate without having to leave home.
These updates aren’t just those made for the consideration of players’ needs during this time of crisis — they’re also necessary changes to ensure Niantic continues to operate both during the pandemic and beyond.
Niantic’s live events have driven big business to the cities that hosted them — nearly $250 million in tourism revenue in 2019, it once said. It also served as a mechanism to drive its own revenues and keep players engaged over time. The plan had worked — Pokémon GO has continued to grow, even though it’s not the hyped-up global phenomenon it was at launch. Last year was its highest-grossing year ever, a report from Sensor Tower found, as the game pulled in nearly $900 million in player spending in 2019. Much of the revenue was due to the game’s significant updates and real-world events, the report noted.
These latest updates aren’t the first changes Niantic has made in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. It had already modified gameplay in Pokémon GO to encourage users to stay inside — including by rewarding players who caught their Pokémon while inside, for example. It also just launched a new form of gameplay called the GO Battle League, which can be played from home, with reduced walking requirements and discounted select items so players wouldn’t have to walk as far to catch Pokémon, among other things.
In Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, the company increased the amount of content that’s near players on the map, so they could progress in the game without traveling far. Potions were also tuned to support people playing from home.
And in both titles, gifts were adjusted to include more helpful content throughout each day.
In Niantic’s first game, Ingress, it has made a few changes, too. Ingress Portals are now tuned to encourage at-home play and it has reduced the need to interact with multiple Portals. Several other changes make it easier to play the game without having to walk around as much.
Niantic has not yet gone so far as to fully eliminate the use of outdoor walks as a means of gameplay, however. Instead, it still encourages people to get outside — in areas where it’s permitted by local authorities to go for walks.
Though Niantic had made earlier changes to its games due to the outbreak, today’s announcement represents a more formal strategy for its business. It also lays out a detailed roadmap of what Niantic has in store. Not all its new features are live. Instead, Niantic says they’ll roll out in the “coming days and weeks,” without committing to an exact time frame.
“We created Niantic with a mission to help people get outside, exercise, and explore the world, with the ultimate goal of helping people connect with others. Today we support a global community of hundreds of millions of people who look to our games for regular entertainment and an opportunity to get outside and connect with friends,” said Niantic founder and CEO John Hanke, on the company blog.
“We have always believed that our games can include elements of indoor play that complement the outdoor, exercise and explore DNA of what we build. Now is the time for us to prioritize this work, with the key challenge of making playing indoors as exciting and innovative as our outdoor gameplay,” he added.
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