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Pokemon GO - Niantic on how they will expand, the future of Pokemon GO
This comes from a Gameindustry interview with Mike Quigley, the chief marketing officer at Niantic...
How Niantic is going to grow after the success of Pokemon GO
''We expect the team to double in size over the course of the next year. But that’s us going from about 70 right now, to being within the 140 to 150 range by the middle of next year. We want to be mindful of cost and how we scale. We are growing but doing so responsibly and carefully, so that we don’t get ahead of ourselves.
Most people don’t know this, but this is our CEO John Hanke’s fourth start-up. With that experience, he is very, very thoughtful about how, when and where we invest. We are brutal in terms about our prioritisation of where we are going to add funds, staff and resources, and also identify places where we are going to hold-off and see how the business is doing. Pokémon Go turned out to be beyond our wildest expectations, but if it had just gone mediocre, we’d still would have been ok. It is a marathon, not a sprint. We have the patience to take that long view.''
On the future of Pokemon GO
''But we are still locked arm-in-arm with The Pokémon Company on Pokémon Go and working together for the foreseeable future. It’s been a fantastic partnership.
“Now we have come out of the tidal wave of craziness that happened in the summer, and people look at the small things and some of the bigger things that we have launched, or will launch, hopefully that gives them confidence that we will continue to invest in Pokémon Go, and hopefully we can keep a lot of those people engaged. Some will lapse out, that’s the nature of mobile free-to-play and we’ve all seen those curves. So if that happens, it wouldn’t surprise us. But we are not really focused on that. We are focused on making it a great game, continuing to invest in it, and the consumers can decide.''