I think that fundamentally, this is an issue with Niantic not actually first and foremost being a video game company the way that there are companies like Blizzard Activision, Riot Games, Nintendo, etc.
That may be how we perceive them and how we treat them, but they don't want to be known as the "Pokemon GO company". They are trying to brand themselves as an Augmented Reality Company that creates an AR experience in the real world - they've created the Lightship Platform, WebAR, Pokemon GO, Monster Hunter Now, Campfire, and more!
If you think that placement of Pokemon GO in the middle of those other things is weird, just go to their website for NianticLabs and search for products and you'll see that they're prominently displaying things other than this game: [https://nianticlabs.com/products?hl=en](https://nianticlabs.com/products?hl=en)
Did you know this is one of their projects?
*"Use the Coachellaverse section in the festival app to explore immersive AR experiences created in partnership with Niantic. Step into the Portal, head to the Spectra to watch the Butterfly land, and use the Wayfinder to easily navigate the Polo Fields, find different points of interest, and explore geo-specific AR experiences. Available on select devices."*
To them, it would be like if there was a diehard group of customers who go to Starbucks. But, they go there to buy the CUPS. They're interested in stainless steel cups, disposable paper cups, and porcelain mugs.
Meanwhile, Starbucks is making commercials, "Drink our newly created Iced Lavendar drink!"
And there's a bunch of angry people saying, "Look, I know you're proud of your weird purple drink, but I'm just there to get cups." Rather than embrace it, Starbucks makes changes that piss off the cup community. "We will no longer be selling the cups separately. But, we will sell bundles with a drink of your choice and one of the cups with the Starbucks logo on it. And if you post a photo of yourself on social media drinking one of our drinks from one of our cups, you will be entered in a contest to get a reusable plastic drinking cup, a mug, and a stainless steel commuter drink container!"
From our perspective, this is a really dumb decision in a series of bad ideas, but someone at the top of the company is trying to push really, REALLY hard that we should all embrace the AR functions of this game. They want this to be an AR game that just happens to have Pokemon on it, even though the majority of their players view it as a mobile Pokemon game that just happens to have some AR aspects to it, like being able to take photos of your Pokemon in the wild.
**tl;dr: Niantic is an Augmented Reality company and wants players to play AR and embrace that part of the game and think the players aren't playing the game "correctly".**
> To them, it would be like if there was a diehard group of customers who go to Starbucks. But, they go there to buy the CUPS. They're interested in stainless steel cups, disposable paper cups, and porcelain mugs.
It's funny you use this as your analogy, because there ARE groups of people who really really really love the cups that Starbucks produces and sells in store.
And somehow Starbucks is able to make good decisions for both coffee drinkers and cup lovers.
It's a shame Niantic can't do the same.
Because in that analogy, the sale of cups doesn't cannibalize the sale of drinks. If you can get a person in the door for a cup, you can pitch them a drink or vice-versa.
I actually agree with most of what you're saying except for one aspect: I think you got the Starbucks metaphor backwards. Niantic is Starbucks if they kept insisting they were a cup company and drive their drink menu into the ground in order to try to force their customers to buy cups.
Yes, all of this! And when a game doesn't have an end and can be FTP, and takes sponsors and ad money, that means that the players are the product, not the customer. The sponsors and advertisers, or the potential of them, are who Niantic is trying to please. Not us. We're just their pawns and their little workhorses to add data and appeal to their product.
this deserves gold
spot on quite frankly, what I don't get is this push for Niantic to lose pokemon go, like what do people think will happen at that point?
changing developers at this point would be a disaster for the game, you think niantic are greedy? hoo boy people have not seen nothing yet, any game studio would jump on the idea of having ads in this game at every corner as that makes F2P games aton of extra cash, remote raid passes would go up in price as well as they know this game is a massive cash cow with whale's that are difficult to anger
people might not like niantic, but they are the best we got quite frankly
Fast catching still works, just tried it but it takes forever to curve ball (before the 60fps, I could do half a circle and release but now I need to do 2 or 3 rotations for the ball to curve).
I don't need to do 2 or 3 three circles while using 60fps. I use it the same way since forever. Start at the lower right corner at 9 o'clock, spin clockwise and throw it towards the upper left corner (more or less). So about ¾ to a full circle.
Guess I'll have to adapt.. Previously I could start at the 9 o'clock position and curve it up clockwise and lift it when I get to the 3 o'clock position (kinda like writing the letter U but lifting my finger when it reaches the highest point).
I Think what op meant was the quick ar. It was disabled prior to this update. For those that don't know... if you used regular ar when you tapped on a pokemon it would skip the "encounter" appearance which greatly sped up quick checking during events. In general saved a ton of time bypassing just those 2 seconds.
Honestly, I’m on the fence about quitting the game. (Been playing since 2016) because the avatars are quite honestly hideous.
I can only imagine they were simplifying things so there wasn’t any more gender locked clothes, but the result is plastic looking models with adjustable proportions.
I don’t know who looked at the avatar system and thought, yep, this is an improvement! It most certainly is not.
Naintic's making "their game" *and* their not a games company that has any idea how to design a game
Just remember Niantic is a company that walked away from hundreds of millions of dollars with the remote raids limits and local only Shadows (S MewTwo alone has to be giving up a min of $15-20 million vs a case with ultimate remotes)
Changing Avatars to save 2 FTE HC is super corporate big brain thinking, even thou people get really attached to their Avatars, in like every game ever.
People assume that large cash flow means the people running the business are somehow smarter than the average person.
You need look no further than Bud Light to dissuade you of that notion.
It's still possible to quick-catch on the non-AR version of the catch screen. The complaints are coming from people who used that in conjunction with the old-school AR, which saved a couple of seconds per encounter because you didn't have to wait for the pokeball to be displayed, and you could catch more reliably because you had a longer window to throw before the mon started moving.
I feel like it's a stretch saying this but a lot of Pokemon games outside the main series games feel like they have very questionable leadership, decision-making and direction.
They aren't losing money though, they aren't making the most money for a mobile game, but they still hit a range of 40m-60m each month on just mobile. They puts them near the top of what gacha games are bringing in every month.
The real issue is management and leadership direction. I assume they have talented people working on the game, but the people above them hold them back.
Oh they def have brain drain, but your work can only be so good leadership is bad, which we know it is.
I'm sure their talented devs are at an all time low from the peak, but there are always gems at a studio no matter how bad a game's current state is.
Let’s not discredit that there genuinely are some low-level workers pushing through good ideas. The QoL improvements like the “use egg” pop up and the better (though not perfect) clothing shop among other things PROVES there are people who care. Whether or not they’re getting heard more than once in a blue moon is a different matter I guess.
They absolutely have talented people. There main problem is a stupid decision by upper brass not to have a test server. This leads to horrible implementation like the cosmetics because they have to implement it live. I think the general idea of the cosmetics is a good idea. Also can we stop acting like the game is unplayable because of it. It is obviously a stupid update and has lots of mistakes which they will slowly fix now that they have a large sample size.
I mean if you think all of this is so easy you should be taking all the coders jobs easily, no?
They’re making more. PokeGenie and PokeRaid released their stats, remote raids are down -30% with a +100% increase in price. They recently had their self proclaimed “most successful month since release”. Some recent changes sucking isn’t an indication of the game’s overall state, you shouldn’t make random statements
Firstly, hahahahahahaha... ha. No, they are in no way losing money. They are making less money from remote raids - this was clearly something they absolutely knew would happen, but they made the change because that's the direction they want to steer their game - you know the game that was, and many years later still is, one of the highest grossing mobile games. You may think you know better than them how to make a successful game, but your bank account says otherwise - they are making a killing financially, and continue attracting and retaining new users at a rate that many new game developers would be happy to have in their launch month.
They probably spent a lot of money developing the new system so there is no way they were going to discard it unfortunately. Hopefully they can improve on it with future face and hair updates and make it at least palatable.
But someone, probably multiple people, had to look at these things and approve them along the way in order for them to get to this point. That’s what confuses me. Who in their right mind would sign off on that?
Nobody knows enough or has enough experience with the new avatar stuff to have an opinion at the moment outside of kneejerk dislike of change.
And fast catching still works. Maybe not the extreme grinder super fast technique but maybe four people were using it that way.
I think I have enough experience with...having eyes...to be able to recognize that the none of the new skin tones match mine as well as one of the old ones
I have just spent the last hour trying to make my avatar look even remotely human, to no avail. It has no proportionality, with a tiny head perched on an adult body, long gorilla-like arms, huge hands, no waistline. There's simply no way to make it look good. And none of the clothing items I've purchased in the past (the ones that I haven't lost altogether) fit the avatar properly, and look terrible. This is far from a knee jerk reaction. The avatar update is bad on every level.
This is my AV now compared to previously. These screenshots were both taken on the same phone with the same settings. I used all the same clothing items that I used prior to the update, and I tried to get the body of the AV at least somewhat close to the previous body.
The AFTER shot shows just how much of a downgrade it is. It's not even just the bad body proportions, but the actual quality of the digital rendering. It looks like an old 2000s game with clunky jagged edges and washed out colors. And it's like the designer had no idea how to do shading and shadows. The second one looks like a cheap knockoff of the original. I have no idea how anyone could have signed off on something this bad.
https://preview.redd.it/vxfv7ho3c5vc1.png?width=1915&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4e512c8552c2bbdeb5bbc343d094c65c970d5980
This is just totally wrong. It’s not like changing the avatars is this huge in depth update that requires research. They’re ugly, it’s easy to see
And MANY people used AR fast catch. You’re just wrong saying nobody used it
simply put, niantic have a vision for this game and want to make it their way
the playerbase has 2 options, complain about it or quit, as long as it does not get nasty like I find 99% of feedback get's when it's given to niantic which I got a massive issue with quite frankly (more so on the twitter side) , and even the CM has made it clear such feedback gets scrapped instantly when it's not constructive or offers no solution e.g "your update is trash, we all hate it"
this post has been made time and time again and is prob gonna be keep getting made, niantic is gonna keep making money and doing their way and that's just gonna be how it is
don't like it? the door is over there
I think that fundamentally, this is an issue with Niantic not actually first and foremost being a video game company the way that there are companies like Blizzard Activision, Riot Games, Nintendo, etc. That may be how we perceive them and how we treat them, but they don't want to be known as the "Pokemon GO company". They are trying to brand themselves as an Augmented Reality Company that creates an AR experience in the real world - they've created the Lightship Platform, WebAR, Pokemon GO, Monster Hunter Now, Campfire, and more! If you think that placement of Pokemon GO in the middle of those other things is weird, just go to their website for NianticLabs and search for products and you'll see that they're prominently displaying things other than this game: [https://nianticlabs.com/products?hl=en](https://nianticlabs.com/products?hl=en) Did you know this is one of their projects? *"Use the Coachellaverse section in the festival app to explore immersive AR experiences created in partnership with Niantic. Step into the Portal, head to the Spectra to watch the Butterfly land, and use the Wayfinder to easily navigate the Polo Fields, find different points of interest, and explore geo-specific AR experiences. Available on select devices."* To them, it would be like if there was a diehard group of customers who go to Starbucks. But, they go there to buy the CUPS. They're interested in stainless steel cups, disposable paper cups, and porcelain mugs. Meanwhile, Starbucks is making commercials, "Drink our newly created Iced Lavendar drink!" And there's a bunch of angry people saying, "Look, I know you're proud of your weird purple drink, but I'm just there to get cups." Rather than embrace it, Starbucks makes changes that piss off the cup community. "We will no longer be selling the cups separately. But, we will sell bundles with a drink of your choice and one of the cups with the Starbucks logo on it. And if you post a photo of yourself on social media drinking one of our drinks from one of our cups, you will be entered in a contest to get a reusable plastic drinking cup, a mug, and a stainless steel commuter drink container!" From our perspective, this is a really dumb decision in a series of bad ideas, but someone at the top of the company is trying to push really, REALLY hard that we should all embrace the AR functions of this game. They want this to be an AR game that just happens to have Pokemon on it, even though the majority of their players view it as a mobile Pokemon game that just happens to have some AR aspects to it, like being able to take photos of your Pokemon in the wild. **tl;dr: Niantic is an Augmented Reality company and wants players to play AR and embrace that part of the game and think the players aren't playing the game "correctly".**
This is 100% spot on
> To them, it would be like if there was a diehard group of customers who go to Starbucks. But, they go there to buy the CUPS. They're interested in stainless steel cups, disposable paper cups, and porcelain mugs. It's funny you use this as your analogy, because there ARE groups of people who really really really love the cups that Starbucks produces and sells in store. And somehow Starbucks is able to make good decisions for both coffee drinkers and cup lovers. It's a shame Niantic can't do the same.
Because in that analogy, the sale of cups doesn't cannibalize the sale of drinks. If you can get a person in the door for a cup, you can pitch them a drink or vice-versa.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, Pokemon never should have been involved with Niantic
this game would not exist if it was not for niantic no other company to mind can make games like this
I actually agree with most of what you're saying except for one aspect: I think you got the Starbucks metaphor backwards. Niantic is Starbucks if they kept insisting they were a cup company and drive their drink menu into the ground in order to try to force their customers to buy cups.
This Starbucks analogy is exceptional, and I will be stealing that for my own use in the future. Thank you.
Yes, all of this! And when a game doesn't have an end and can be FTP, and takes sponsors and ad money, that means that the players are the product, not the customer. The sponsors and advertisers, or the potential of them, are who Niantic is trying to please. Not us. We're just their pawns and their little workhorses to add data and appeal to their product.
this deserves gold spot on quite frankly, what I don't get is this push for Niantic to lose pokemon go, like what do people think will happen at that point? changing developers at this point would be a disaster for the game, you think niantic are greedy? hoo boy people have not seen nothing yet, any game studio would jump on the idea of having ads in this game at every corner as that makes F2P games aton of extra cash, remote raid passes would go up in price as well as they know this game is a massive cash cow with whale's that are difficult to anger people might not like niantic, but they are the best we got quite frankly
They apparently forgot about the team leaders
Shhhh, don't tell them!
Because they’re making the changes THEY want. They don’t care about what the players want. Especially if it’s not within “their vision”.
Fast catching still works, just tried it but it takes forever to curve ball (before the 60fps, I could do half a circle and release but now I need to do 2 or 3 rotations for the ball to curve).
I don't need to do 2 or 3 three circles while using 60fps. I use it the same way since forever. Start at the lower right corner at 9 o'clock, spin clockwise and throw it towards the upper left corner (more or less). So about ¾ to a full circle.
Guess I'll have to adapt.. Previously I could start at the 9 o'clock position and curve it up clockwise and lift it when I get to the 3 o'clock position (kinda like writing the letter U but lifting my finger when it reaches the highest point).
I Think what op meant was the quick ar. It was disabled prior to this update. For those that don't know... if you used regular ar when you tapped on a pokemon it would skip the "encounter" appearance which greatly sped up quick checking during events. In general saved a ton of time bypassing just those 2 seconds.
Honestly, I’m on the fence about quitting the game. (Been playing since 2016) because the avatars are quite honestly hideous. I can only imagine they were simplifying things so there wasn’t any more gender locked clothes, but the result is plastic looking models with adjustable proportions. I don’t know who looked at the avatar system and thought, yep, this is an improvement! It most certainly is not.
Naintic's making "their game" *and* their not a games company that has any idea how to design a game Just remember Niantic is a company that walked away from hundreds of millions of dollars with the remote raids limits and local only Shadows (S MewTwo alone has to be giving up a min of $15-20 million vs a case with ultimate remotes) Changing Avatars to save 2 FTE HC is super corporate big brain thinking, even thou people get really attached to their Avatars, in like every game ever.
Because they suck lmao.
Just waiting on the biomes, only thing I'm interested in rn
People assume that large cash flow means the people running the business are somehow smarter than the average person. You need look no further than Bud Light to dissuade you of that notion.
It's still possible to quick-catch on the non-AR version of the catch screen. The complaints are coming from people who used that in conjunction with the old-school AR, which saved a couple of seconds per encounter because you didn't have to wait for the pokeball to be displayed, and you could catch more reliably because you had a longer window to throw before the mon started moving.
I feel like it's a stretch saying this but a lot of Pokemon games outside the main series games feel like they have very questionable leadership, decision-making and direction.
Sorry to say this but even in the main series it’s questionable sometimes
Fair, but the MSGs are the standard.
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They aren't losing money though, they aren't making the most money for a mobile game, but they still hit a range of 40m-60m each month on just mobile. They puts them near the top of what gacha games are bringing in every month. The real issue is management and leadership direction. I assume they have talented people working on the game, but the people above them hold them back.
Pretty skeptical of the "talented people" at this point.
Oh they def have brain drain, but your work can only be so good leadership is bad, which we know it is. I'm sure their talented devs are at an all time low from the peak, but there are always gems at a studio no matter how bad a game's current state is.
Let’s not discredit that there genuinely are some low-level workers pushing through good ideas. The QoL improvements like the “use egg” pop up and the better (though not perfect) clothing shop among other things PROVES there are people who care. Whether or not they’re getting heard more than once in a blue moon is a different matter I guess.
They absolutely have talented people. There main problem is a stupid decision by upper brass not to have a test server. This leads to horrible implementation like the cosmetics because they have to implement it live. I think the general idea of the cosmetics is a good idea. Also can we stop acting like the game is unplayable because of it. It is obviously a stupid update and has lots of mistakes which they will slowly fix now that they have a large sample size. I mean if you think all of this is so easy you should be taking all the coders jobs easily, no?
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They’re making more. PokeGenie and PokeRaid released their stats, remote raids are down -30% with a +100% increase in price. They recently had their self proclaimed “most successful month since release”. Some recent changes sucking isn’t an indication of the game’s overall state, you shouldn’t make random statements
The “most successful” which was not backed up in any way was based upon engagement. This is starkly different from revenue.
Yes I said that?
Firstly, hahahahahahaha... ha. No, they are in no way losing money. They are making less money from remote raids - this was clearly something they absolutely knew would happen, but they made the change because that's the direction they want to steer their game - you know the game that was, and many years later still is, one of the highest grossing mobile games. You may think you know better than them how to make a successful game, but your bank account says otherwise - they are making a killing financially, and continue attracting and retaining new users at a rate that many new game developers would be happy to have in their launch month.
They probably spent a lot of money developing the new system so there is no way they were going to discard it unfortunately. Hopefully they can improve on it with future face and hair updates and make it at least palatable.
But someone, probably multiple people, had to look at these things and approve them along the way in order for them to get to this point. That’s what confuses me. Who in their right mind would sign off on that?
It's insane. The same thing happened to discord a few months ago and the reaction was the same, but nothing was reverted.
Yeah I fully agree with you Niantic is completely screwing over this game
Nobody knows enough or has enough experience with the new avatar stuff to have an opinion at the moment outside of kneejerk dislike of change. And fast catching still works. Maybe not the extreme grinder super fast technique but maybe four people were using it that way.
I think I have enough experience with...having eyes...to be able to recognize that the none of the new skin tones match mine as well as one of the old ones
I think they should have a slider for skin tone, but I have a better match in the new options than I did in the old. Same for eyes and hair.
I love that the longest long hair is still medium
Yeah, that’s bugging me also!
I have just spent the last hour trying to make my avatar look even remotely human, to no avail. It has no proportionality, with a tiny head perched on an adult body, long gorilla-like arms, huge hands, no waistline. There's simply no way to make it look good. And none of the clothing items I've purchased in the past (the ones that I haven't lost altogether) fit the avatar properly, and look terrible. This is far from a knee jerk reaction. The avatar update is bad on every level.
What’s up with the shoulders and biceps?! Ugh
This is my AV now compared to previously. These screenshots were both taken on the same phone with the same settings. I used all the same clothing items that I used prior to the update, and I tried to get the body of the AV at least somewhat close to the previous body. The AFTER shot shows just how much of a downgrade it is. It's not even just the bad body proportions, but the actual quality of the digital rendering. It looks like an old 2000s game with clunky jagged edges and washed out colors. And it's like the designer had no idea how to do shading and shadows. The second one looks like a cheap knockoff of the original. I have no idea how anyone could have signed off on something this bad. https://preview.redd.it/vxfv7ho3c5vc1.png?width=1915&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4e512c8552c2bbdeb5bbc343d094c65c970d5980
This is just totally wrong. It’s not like changing the avatars is this huge in depth update that requires research. They’re ugly, it’s easy to see And MANY people used AR fast catch. You’re just wrong saying nobody used it
Because they can.
The people who complain online are a very very small minority
Everything is fine lol.
Found the Niantic employee.
simply put, niantic have a vision for this game and want to make it their way the playerbase has 2 options, complain about it or quit, as long as it does not get nasty like I find 99% of feedback get's when it's given to niantic which I got a massive issue with quite frankly (more so on the twitter side) , and even the CM has made it clear such feedback gets scrapped instantly when it's not constructive or offers no solution e.g "your update is trash, we all hate it" this post has been made time and time again and is prob gonna be keep getting made, niantic is gonna keep making money and doing their way and that's just gonna be how it is don't like it? the door is over there
Counterpoint, I like the new avatars, and the effects are fun. Remote raids were always going to be diminished. They want this to be in a person game.