YouSaid · the spoken record

John Hanke

lines on the record: 89
first: 2016-09-19
most recent: 2016-09-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Like you do after a hard day of snowboarding or biking. I mean, you know, we're exhausted but elated. It's been so much fun to see people enjoy the thing that we work so hard on and to hear the stories of people getting outside, spending time with their family, going to new places. That's very energizing to us. It's been a busy two months, so we're now happy that we're kind of stabilized and we're able to start being a little more thoughtful about the next set of features that we want to build.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More the latter. I mean, we will be working closely with these people because the technology is something that we probably know better than anyone else on the server side in terms of how to make it work.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we've launched the first generation Pokemon, the Pokemon fans out there will know that there are over 700 Pokemon total, so new waves of Pokemon to appear in the future. And ingress, we are continuing to also invest in that. There will be an ingress 2.0 at some point in the future. And beyond that, I can't say except that our platform has gotten the attention of a lot of people with interesting ideas for games that they want to build. Would you want to be other games?”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Pokemon, we've just launched Buddies for Pokemon. That's what I did for you very, very recently. Okay. So you can pick a buddy Pokemon and walk with it and earn candy by walking with your buddy Pokemon. As I said earlier, Pokemon Go is a game that we think will be around for years. We are investing in features that you'll see in some and weeks, some in months down the road, some of the things that we touched on earlier would be among those features. So we're definitely a lot of the company is focused on Pokemon Go and will be indefinitely to adding to, extending that game.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, last question. Obviously, you've gotten a huge amount of media attention, and the media is sort of like what's a mentality that's shorter than a gnat's memory, something like that. They just move on. They want to declare victory and then disaster. But really what's next? Do you have to create new games or can you just keep developing this? What are you working on? What's your next game? What have you done for us lately, John?”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is. But yeah, I think it's a great compliment to games like this. So you can play and little bitty doses during the day. But if you ever want to go in and look through your Pokedex and see all of your Pokemon and kind of do the more intricate things of the UI, you can always shift over to that if you want to.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, a lot of people are, I mean, these kinds of games, people weave them in and out of their daily routine. So you may be commuting, you might be waiting on a bus, you might be hopping on a ferry. There are these little moments of downtime. And the game really fits in nicely into those. You can harvest items and look for Pokemon at the various stages of your commute. That's what I do. In the mornings. And I bike, for example. And yeah, I'm really looking forward to having the new Apple Watch. It looks like a really nice piece of hardware.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm actually, you know, I've played around with the Apple Watch, but there was nothing to keep me wearing it every And the first time when you were on stage, I was like, I can see that partly because I have my phone out constantly playing”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we announced it last week, and it functions in a way similar to the Pokemon Go Plus. It's a companion device and on your watch. You can see if you're near a Pokestop, so if you're walking next to that historical site that's a Pokestop, it shows up there. You can actually flick on the Apple Watch and they have this really awesome 3D engine on the watchdown. You can see the graphics. You can see the items coming out. If you pass near a Pokemon alerts on your watch, you know it's there. You can then take your phone out and capture it and sort of full graphical glory if you want to. But to the point I was making earlier, a lot of your, if you're going out every day and you're like, well, now I'm in the habit. I'm going to do this 40 minute walk every day and Pokemon is kind of the thing I do to help me motivate me to do that. A lot of that can happen without looking at your phone and without kind of consuming sources.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But yeah, the Pokemon Go Plus device, which we were talking about earlier, is a way to do that, so you can accumulate items and your phone isn't rendering 3D the whole time. If you do want to stop and see the Pokemon and Capture it, you can do that. But out of a gameplay session of if you're out for 45 minutes or an hour, it may be that you only have the screen on and looking at it 15 minutes out of that 45 minutes or an hour instead of the whole time as you are today. And then the Apple Watch, which I think is fantastic.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's a couple of questions there. So, in terms of resource usage, we do take full advantage of almost everything that the phone does. So we're using GPS, we're using 3D graphics of the phone, we're using the network to send data back and forth. So we're really putting a lot of stress on that device. And we do want to make it as power efficient as possible. But yeah, you do see people playing with external battery packs. We're going to try to continue to tune and optimize that. One of the ways that we're really interested in doing that is enabling you to do certain things in the game with the screen off. So if you want to accumulate kilometers to hatch your eggs or if your kids do. You don't necessarily need to have the screen on and run.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things about it is it's a fairly resource intensive game in a lot of ways, one of which is battery life. I mean, you've single-handedly given a huge boost to the battery pack industry. You can tell somebody's playing because they're powering up their phone. How high is making it more less resource intensive on your list and what's kind of tops on your priority list in terms of how do you make it more appealing for people to stay with the game?”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just good game design and game balancing. I think with Pokemon Go, it's actually a pretty nice experience because your initial flow into the game is about capturing Pokemon. It starts out as more of a single player experience where you're finding Pokemon in your neighborhood and gradually accumulating more and more and you learn how to level them up and evolve them. And then you get to the team competition through gyms. And that's where level and experience starts to come into play more. But that initial experience, you as a new player, you can be oblivious to the fact there may be some super high level players in your neighborhood. It's not going to inhibit your ability to have fun. It's just sort of happening over there. And you get to figure out what's fun about the game. And once you get to the point where you want to kind of join in with that, you know, bigger community, then you'll be leveled up enough where that's possible without any big issues.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bringing new players in. Some people say the longer you've been in, the more benefits you have and you're stronger or various things. How do you onboard a lot of new people in this if they feel like they're behind in the development of it?”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just a different type of game, and history would bear that out gaming and ingress was about to hit its four-year mark and is bigger than ever. Pokemon Go will be around four years and years. And yes, there was this initial surge of downloads because of this sort of pop culture explosion that's now stabilizing and we're off to build the foundation of that game.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“MMOs have that characteristic of it being about spending time with friends and people that you've met. And the old style MMOs, it was virtual. So you were spending time with avatars online. The new version with Ingress on Pokemon Go is you're spending time with real people. It might be your family members, it might be your friends, it might be people that you've befriended through playing the game. But those relationships are real and it's fun and the game is a catalyst for just hanging out and going places and spending time together. That doesn't get old.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“MMOs, World of Warcraft being a perfect example, 10 year life span at this point, you know, the communities form in that type of game. They're called guilds. Ingress has the two factions. Pokemon Go has three teams. And once you begin to play together cooperatively with a group of people, As much like a softball game, you might get together with a group of people after work and go play softball, and then you have food and drinks afterwards. It's an excuse to socialize together. Softball doesn't, you don't stop playing softball, right? You don't stop.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I mean, the typo game that we decided to spend our time building originally with Ingress, but now with Pokemon Go, the choice of very deliberate to build something that people in the gaming industry refer to as an MMO or massively multiplayer online game, this would be a relative to something like a world of Warcraft for PC games. And the distinguishing characteristic of MMOs is that they're as much about the community of players as they are about the content of the game. So a sort of standalone single player video game is typically about the user consuming content. So screens, characters, level, you progress through it, the game has so much stuff in it, and when ultimately you exhaust the stuff and you're done with the game and you move on.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Example, because in a VR situation you're isolating yourself from everything around you and entering this completely virtual space. AR is designed to add, enhance the things you do as a human being, being outside, socializing with other people, shopping, playing, having fun. AR can make all those things better. And I think when we eventually get there, the technology is significantly more challenging than VR because of the need to register reality and what you're overlaying on it. People like Magic Leap and Project Tango at Google, Microsoft Hollow Lens, people are working on solving those problems. And I think the opportunity there is a really big one, not only for gaming, but it will be the next big transformative step in technology, I think.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was really early, and it wasn't true augmented reality people talk about. AR and heads up displays being different. It was more of a heads up display, but it is the direction that I think is far more interesting and promising for technology and really for humanity than VR”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe you'll bring back Google Glass somehow, like a reason for it. But, you know, the everyone always insults Google Glass, including myself, but conceptually and directionally it was correct. It is a correct direction. This heads up display. The device itself wasn't quite right for lots of reasons.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, from the very beginning for our games, they're about wanting to encourage people to get outside and see interesting places. So it's, you know, we've mixed feelings about people looking at their screen when we're trying to lead them out into the park where they can see the beautiful statue and trees and nature. So we're always looking for ways to kind of combine gameplay with either good design on the part of the software on the client or other devices that let you play more of heads up. So you can talk to the people around you. You can take in the amazing sites around you. So maybe at some point in the future there will be augmented reality glasses which overlay Pokemon and other things seamlessly into our environment. But those don't exist yet. So we're looking for those interim steps where you can have some heads up gameplay. It's not designed to completely replace playing on your phone so you want to see those Pokemon. You want to organize them. You may want to go out and capture them using your phone at times. But there are other times when you may”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And on the more immediate horizon, there's a couple things coming on the hardware side. One is this attachment. I'm holding one here. It's a very simple attachment that's designed, and the good part is I can keep my phone in my pocket a little bit, which is good. I won't be walking into as many people. But it does seem to take away a little of the excitement and skill. You're just pushing a button when it lights up. Talk about the thinking behind this attachment.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, I think you could look at an ingress event as a template. In general, and with Ingress, the two teams in Ingress compete. It lasts over a four hour period. Typically, the area that you're playing in is around three kilometer kind of walk that you're moving through during the day. When we have an ingress event, people typically come in on Friday night, stay Saturday morning, they're meeting, planning, their strategy for the day with the rest of the team. Then there's four hours of gameplay, and then there's a big event at the end where we announce the winners, and then typically lots of after parties arranged by the teams themselves where people continue. It's sort of like a college football weekend, but organized around a game. So I think, you know, it'll be a bit different with Pokemon Go. It's a different game, but the idea of having people coming together, having an event that moves you through an interesting part of the city. So it's part walking tour, part competition, and then having a big get-together at the end where we're announcing winners, leaderboards, typically with an ingress event, there's a kind of fair, like said.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The crowds have been big, so yeah, we want to make sure that if we do put on an event that we can adequately handle the number of people who show up.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there have been big events around the world, Sydney Opera House is a big one, and I think we probably will. That was the original intent. We had this learning from Ingress that they're really fun and they're great ways to energize the community. It's a great way to retain your players over time, keep them interested in the game. We simply haven't done it so far. Well, it's only been two months since launch.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that was my introduction to the game. I'd been on vacation for a week. I come back. I'd read a little bit about it, but I was trying to stay offline. Someone said there's a Pokemon pub craw I went around and I was hooked ever since.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two out of three months of every quarter we have events, and we usually have one in Asia, one in Europe, and one in the US on a single weekend. It's a 24-hour. So what about Pokemon Go? That's a global thing.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The events in ingress have been really the lifeblood of that game. That's what I mean, yeah. And we do have those, we have them.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, those are great social activities. And we've said in the past that trading is coming and player versus player battling is something that we talk a lot about internally. And I think it very much is within the spirit of Pokemon Go. So it's possible you'll see that as well.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So when Pokemon Go, there's the concept of gems, which there's three teams in Pokemon Go, and the three teams are competing over the gyms, and you can actually challenge a gym much more effectively if you come with a group of people. So a group of people can all simultaneously attack the gym together. So, you really want to get your team missing.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With people locally, and you have to know players in other cities, and then that expands globally. So in Europe, people in Germany and Russia and the UK and Italy are all cooperating together to”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Pokemon Go today, but you'll see more in the future, where there are game design features that encourage people in groups who may live even in different cities or maybe even live hundreds of thousands of miles away to cooperate. So an ingress, the game is about connecting portals with a link from one place to another and to connect three of them, you create a control field. So you can think about just a giant map of the world and you're trying to create. Both two teams are trying to create these control fields to create those links you have to have a key from this distant city in the place where you're creating the link from. So it means that if I want to create a link from San Francisco to Los Angeles, I have to know somebody in Los Angeles and arrange to meet them somewhere. If they're flying up to San Francisco, they may drop off some keys and give them to somebody and they may be transferred because you can't email them. You can only physically transfer these things. So basically the game design means that to be successful, you have to be part of a team. You have to work.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, it's different than a normal mobile game in the sense that your chat window can be, you know, you talking to the people that you're playing with. And the discovery mechanism for finding other people that are playing the game are looking up at the fountain in the park and seeing the 12 other people that are also playing Pokemon go there. So a lot of it is just designing a game that people can play socially together and have fun together. So there are cooperative elements to it. In Pokemon Go, for example, you and I, if we're out walking together, we'll see the same Pokemon. And I was out walking the dog with my son yesterday and it's like, oh, there's a side duck and we can both go capture it together because we have this shared alternate reality that we're both seeing through those devices. So we think about social as designing a game that is fun for people to do together in real life. And there's another layer to it in ingress and we're just beginning to see elements of it.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Designed into it and hoped people would enjoy, and that's the incentive to get outside and be active, and just the pleasure that comes from that, just from taking a short walk every day, kind of motivated by a game, the discovery of interesting places in your city that you didn't know about, a park that you didn't know about, or an interesting historical site in your city that you didn't know about. And then the social aspect of it, which are the real social interactions. It's going out with your kids and playing together as a family. It's going out with your friends and playing as a group. Or banding together with an even larger group of people and going out in ingress to capture a portal or in Pokemon to go compete at a gym. So, yeah, I mean, those were all appreciated by the ingress community. And, you know, I think they're just generally positive things. So we're really gratified to see this. But the darkable...”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I love ingress, and we all have loved it. We've worked on it. The community is amazing, continued to play and bring more people into the game. We have events around the world monthly for ingress. So it's going strong. It's wonderful actually to see more people appreciate the characteristics of ingress, which we”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Museums, churches, murals are all valid locations for within ingress when they were originally submitted. So the goal was for it to be playable in small towns, and I've played in a ton of small towns across the US for going to ingress events and also Pokemon Go. So it may not be everywhere, but we did try to accommodate for that. We don't currently accept submissions for new locations. We stopped that about a year ago because we had 15 million submissions and we thought we had pretty reasonable coverage, but our intent is to open that back up to allow submissions of new places. Pokemon Go has penetrated to, you know, I was looking at requests from players to add Pokestops in these far reaches of Brazil, like up near the Amazon and looking at some of these towns. And there are places where there aren't enough game locations. So we will open that back up.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did you try to play where your parents live? Yeah, it wasn't much. I mean, it's interesting because I grew up in a small town out in West Texas, and one of the design goals for Angressa and for Pokemon.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what about in rural areas? I mean, the game is really popular. I played it in San Francisco where I live, but also I was just in Miami, there's great locations. But when I go visit my parents who live an hour and a half north of here, it's kind of a wasteland. And I wonder, should there be a way for people to add Pokestops or do something other than buy a million incense or lures”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The hatch And I was like, all right, go right ahead. You can hatch that Pokemon So, those are the places that populated ingress and then that were carried over into Pokemon Go. And we have a limited number of commercial sponsors in Ingress and then in Pokemon Go we have McDonald's in Japan. And we do have that as a part of the game and we're experimenting with that. It complements the internet purchase revenue and allows us to not be as aggressive with innet purchase, for example, by having that. And we'll be cautiously exploring that. We don't want to have too many commercial locations in the game because the original spirit of it was get out and discover these interesting”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of a hidden gem. There's a historical plaque about Mark Twain tucked away in the corner of the park in the community where I live. And it's an ingress portal. So to kind of lead people into these little”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have to really go back to the origins of Niantic to really understand where the Pok ⁇ stops and gems are located. Those were, as I said, many of them came from Field Trip. Historical markers are one of the data sets that we use to locate these things. And then for Ingress, we were thinking about, well, how do we expand this set of interesting places that are public, that are visually recognizable, that are safe places for people to be at? And so we crowdsourced that. So ingress players were able to submit their local landmarks that they thought were cool. It could be a statue in the park. It could be an interesting historical home, a museum type location. It could be a unique local business. So that data set got created and refined over three years of ingress. And then a subset of that was used to populate Pokemon Go. But the goal there was to encourage people to visit places in their town or community that are interesting, that are culturally interesting, that are just kind of fun places to check out cool local land.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And how does it work with people that either like the attention or don't? So you have two different things. You have people like the Holocaust Museum saying, hey, please don't. This isn't that kind of space. And then you have businesses and other people saying, we'd love to be a Pokestop. We're not. How do you guys handle both the people that want to get off the grid, if you will? They want to not be a Pokestop, as well as the business interest. I mean, you have a big deal with McDonald's, but I'm sure everyone in their coffee shop mother is trying to knock on your door.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The hackers can be that way. So all that got echoed kind of through mainstream media. And then the Olympics happened and it kind of took off. We launched to Brazil kind of right as the Olympics were starting and then that whole kind of press cycle happened. And it has raised a lot of issues about public space and what it means to mix this kind of alternate reality experience and public space. The number of users surprised us. So some of the crowds that showed up at parks and places like that, had we Thought that the numbers would be that large. Maybe there are things that we could have done to try to ameliorate that a little bit.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we did have a couple of outages scaling up. We had some folks trying to hack us. We had to make some adjustments to the server to kind of deal with people who are trying to hack their location and things like that. And all that was played out there were people that were unhappy that we were blocked. There were hackers that were unhappy on Reddit, that we were blocking their hacking attempts.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's been interesting for that all to play out in such a compressed period of time and under the sort of, I mean, I've never seen a press interaction quite like this where everything has just been written about every possible angle. The way that it took off initially, it did happen extremely quickly. I was actually in Japan for an ingress event. We had the biggest event we've ever had for ingress. Over 10,000 people coming together there. We had launched in the US and Australia, and I took off for that. And then all these, you know, my wife sending me stories, you know, Jimmy Fallon's, you know, talking about Pokemon Go and Colbert reports talking about Pokemon Go. It was just kind of permeated pop culture, professional athletes were tweeting pictures of themselves with Pokemon. So that was kind of the unpredictable thing the way it insinuated itself into pop culture and just kind of exploded the number of people who came into the pipeline.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was not in our plan No, actually, the number of monthly active users is how we model things in our plan. The peak that we hit in our plan four years out is a fraction of where we are.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it does great in terms of retention and monetization. It's probably on a per user basis doesn't monetize as high as some of the most aggressive games because we don't turn the knobs up on the internet purchase in the way that some products do. We're trying to be more user-friendly, I guess, in that sense. But it monetizes as well. Yeah, it's good. I mean, it was a huge mass of downloads that came and it's continuing to hold strong in our users are playing and we're rolling out new features.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What is your thought in terms of how the stickiness has been? I mean, the spend has to be pretty good. I mean, people spend more time and money in Pokemon Go than any other game. I don't know. Certainly per user, I think.”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were great. And so, with their help, yeah, we were able to just absorb that load with only a few. There were some outages, and it wasn't perfect. But yeah, I mean, we were able to ramp up and let all these people come in and play Pokemon”
2016-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hanke, CEO, Niantic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT