In a very interesting interview, Niantic’s chief marketing officer, Mike Quigley, talked about how the summer felt both great and awful for Pokemon GO (Free) and about how he sees the game’s future. He first talked about how overwhelmed they were by the way the game took off and how the game’s incredible success caught them out of position. He admitted that the summer was quite painful since no one managed to sleep much during the race to get the game playable under the strain of the millions of players. They didn’t expect such success (let’s be honest, no one did), so the company hadn’t even hired a Pokemon GO community manager initially, which explains all the initial communication issues between the developers and the players.

The interview goes on to talk about the decision to remove third-party apps – they were crushing Niantic on the server side – and how Niantic sees the game more like an MMO than anything else. Quigley compared the game with World of Warcraft rather than other mobile games in terms of longevity and monetization. This is quite an extensive and interesting interview that sheds light on what was, and is, going on in Niantic. You can read the whole interview here.

[via Eurogamer]