Niantic discusses the challenges of working on/playing Pokemon GO from home

Almost all game developers and publishers have had to deal with quite a shift due to the pandemic, moving people out of their usual office spaces into a work-from-home scenario. The team at Niantic certainly had to take that on, but they've had a doubly stressful situation, as Pokemon GO is all about playing outside and on the move.

In an interview with VentureBeat, Niantic's Greg Borrud talks about how the company has tackled working from home, and shifting Pokemon GO to a game that can be enjoyed within the comforts of your house.

“It’s been challenging, I’m going to be honest. The first priority was really looking after our employees, making sure that we could safely and properly continue to work and develop our products, while they’re dealing with [wild] stuff. The teams [have been] amazing, both our development team and our cross-functional teams. Then, it was thinking about the products.”

When you have these real world games, you have to be able to be really nimble. So, I think the first thing that our teams did, which was just amazing, is that they went in and they did a lot of really quick changes to make sure that people could play from home. That was adjusting spawn rates, the types of things that spawn, [and] the types of activities that you do. Within hours or days, at the most, we were able to make these kinds of rapid changes.”