This comes from a The Verge interview with Niantic CEO John Hanke...
V: When you look at where the game is now, and compare it to your initial road map, how similar are the two?
JH: We lost probably six months on our schedule because of the success of the game. Really all the way through November and December, from launch onward we were rebuilding and rewiring infrastructure just to keep the game running at the scale that we were running at. We were fortunate to have a massive launch, a massive success, and many, many more users than we had planned for. But we had to redirect a substantial portion of the engineering team to [work on] infrastructure versus new features. That switched off things like extending gyms, it pushed out things we still want to have, like player-versus-player and trading. I’d say we’re about six months behind where we thought we would be.
On the other hand, we did Pokémon Go Plus, which was something we took on kind of late in the cycle. But it was fun to get that experience with a hardware add-on. We [added generation two pokémon], we’ve staffed up our live operations team, and I think players have really enjoyed the events we’ve been able to do. There are some things we did that we weren’t necessarily planning, and others we haven’t quite gotten to yet.
V: When you look back over the last 12 months, are there things you would have done differently with the perspective you have now?
JH: Certainly if we could’ve predicted the future, it would’ve been great to have had an even bigger team working on the product so we could have even more of the features that we want in at launch. We delayed our ability to get to things like the gyms and the raids, and we haven’t gotten to the player-versus-player and some of the things we thought we’d be able to get to pretty shortly after launch. But we only had so much money, and we were doing what we thought was reasonable.
V: What about in terms of communication? Do you wish you hadn’t talked about things like PvP and trading, given how long they’re taking to implement?
JH: Well, had we not had to divert resources to infrastructure versus features, I think we would’ve had some of those things out earlier. I don’t know. If we had of known we were going to have those delays, maybe we wouldn’t have talked so much about them. Although, it’s important to let people know that you’re thinking about certain things, and that you are building toward them, even if they’re not immediately available.
I think early on, between ourselves and The Pokémon Company and Nintendo, there wasn’t a real consensus about how to communicate with players on forums like Reddit, Twitter, and other social media platforms. With our previous game Ingress we were very communicative with players, and very open. And we weren’t as communicative and open in the beginning [of Pokémon Go] because that was sort of a new process for our partners. I think we’ve become much more open over time, and that’s really helped make the community happier, by us being present and talking more about what’s going on.
from GoNintendo
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