Pokémon Co. talks about lack of Pokémon GO at World Championships

A portion of a GamesBeat interview with Pokémon Co's J.C. Smith...

GamesBeat: This year you had specifically note that it’s not open to the general public and it’s not a Pokémon Go event. Did people get the message, or did they show up anyway?

Smith: [laughs] They got it. Whether they wanted to hear it, I don’t know. It was an unfortunate situation, really. Every year we have a great turnout, a great group of fans. This year, more fans than ever qualified, more players than ever. The fire marshal wasn’t going to let us squeeze more people in. We all agree that safety is not something you compromise on. You need to make sure the players and the families who earn their way in are a priority. The fans that come along with them, unfortunately some of them aren’t able to be a part.

GamesBeat: The Go phenomenon is probably helping?

Smith: You know, this group has always been robust. To be honest, Go is introducing a lot of new people to it. But the group here started playing this time last year. We hadn’t even announced Go. For us, the real question will be how next year is affected. All the tournaments that start at the local level, I’m sure, will see increases based on general interest in the Pokémon brand, to say nothing of Sun and Moon coming out this fall.

Sun and Moon was always going to be one of the top titles of the year, regardless. With all the 20th anniversary stuff this year—we kicked off last year with the Go announcement. Then this year we’re celebrating 20, so we did the Super Bowl ad. We did all kinds of stuff around Pokémon Day, February 27. We’ve had monthly rollouts of new information, new products. We’ve had a lot more activity than normal. Then Go launches. We’ve got a lot of stuff making it fun for the fans out there.

GamesBeat: Have you figured out how to do Go tournaments yet?

Smith: It’s funny. Go is a great introduction, but I don’t see—I haven’t figured what the competitive element will be. It’s cool to have people who can play casually. It’s cool that they can collect and find their favorite characters around the world. We’ve joked about it. But I don’t think it’s something we can make work in a weekend.

We had to make a statement about no Go here. Niantic’s here, and so people always assume there’s a secret or something like that. Rumors of it would have cause people to descend on the location. They couldn’t have gotten in and it would have made things even worse.