Pokemon GO is quickly approaching its 10th anniversary, but for Niantic, the milestone is about more than celebrating the past. It marks a major turning point for a game that has grown from a simple AR experiment into a global live-service game, complete with raids, PvP systems, seasonal content, and worldwide events. As the community looks ahead to anniversary festivities, there are undoubtedly questions about what the future holds for Pokemon GO and how it plans to evolve in its second decade.
At Pokemon GO Tour: Kalos in Los Angeles, GameRant sat down with VP of Product Michael Steranka to discuss everything from Super Mega Raids and PvP improvements to the game’s onboarding challenges and long-term vision. Over the course of the conversation, Steranka reflected on what the 10-year milestone means for the team, how Niantic is responding to player feedback, and why the studio believes Pokemon GO can become a truly multi-generational game. The following transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Super Mega Raids, Challenge, and Community Strategy
Q: The kind of big thing is the Super Mega Raid. How long has that been in the works?
A: It’s been in the works for a while. As soon as we found out that the Pokemon company was going to be creating this Pokemon Legends Z-A game, that gave us a good indication that there might be more of an emphasis on the larger ecosystem around Mega Pokemon. This is a system that we have not touched in a few years, and it might be a good opportunity to reinvest.
For me personally, as someone who has been playing for a long time, I have felt recently that we need newer challenges for our players to take on together. Even in a lot of our Tier 5 Legendary Raids, I have seen people being able to defeat legendary Pokemon with just two people or solo in extreme cases. So, with the power creep in Pokemon GO, we are at the point now where we should have that next tier of challenge for people to rise to.
Q: What’s the perspective on that solo or duo thing? Because I know that certain people like to give players that challenge and other games want to say you shouldn’t be able to do this.
A: It’s an interesting balance because I’m the type of person that wants to be able to go solo and do challenges myself, and it is a core part of the player fantasy to just become such a powerful Pokemon trainer that you can do all these things with the strongest Pokemon in the world. But as I’m sure you know, Pokemon GO is always at its core about bringing communities together. So, we always want to make sure that the number one thing that we’re pushing people towards is meeting and collaborating with others in their local community. If you think about the sort of long tooth of the Pokemon GO journey, once you meet others in your community, that is how you also learn about what the most optimal strategies are, and then certain types of individuals like myself will take that to the furthest extreme of what is actually possible.
Q: We’re experiencing it here, so most of these people are informed. But there is that element of instructing the player within the game. Are there conversations going on based on what you’re seeing here that will influence what goes down the line in terms of helping people understand?
A: One of the things we’re noticing already is when your lobby is full, we do something for the players’ benefit where we just truncate the lobby timer down to 10 seconds. But what we are finding with this system is that it might not be enough time to remember Mega-evolve your Pokemon. Or if you are doing multiple raids, maybe your Mega Pokemon has fainted, and you don’t have time to heal it. So, I don’t have a solution to share right now, but it’s definitely something that we’re looking at as a new point of friction, and we should think about this in the future if we really want to make this as seamless of an experience as possible.
Q: I noticed when it first appeared and people didn’t fully know, yet there was almost this feeling of “This is almost impossible if we don’t all have a Mega,” but here, you’re brute forcing it. There are at least a handful of people who have Megas, but if you’re just at that limit of this is only possible if everyone has a Mega, being able to communicate that.
A: Totally. We actually saw something similar when we launched the Dynamax and Gigantamax feature. It was a very different style of battling in the game, and a lot of people were used to bringing whatever Pokemon and, through the sheer power of 20 people, brute force this. But with DMax and GMax, that wasn’t the case. You actually needed to be thoughtful about the Pokemon that you brought. So, when that feature first launched, the community at large was like, “This is impossible. We have 40 people here, and we still can’t take on these battles.”
But, over time, as people start to learn and understand what they need to do in order to overcome something, then you start to get that feeling of mastery. And then it also, from my perspective, becomes this teaching moment within the in-person communities where our community leaders can go to newer members of the community and remind them to do certain things. And I do think fostering this social sharing of strategies is a really unique and core element of being a Pokemon GO player.
Q: Are there conversations as far as putting things in the game to teach people, for example, what a tank might be?
A: We really try to strike a balance there. The thing that we don’t want to do is handhold players so much so that you lose this feeling of agency. Personally speaking, some of my favorite things about other games that I play are communities working together to figure out what the optimal strategy is and helping each other out. I think one of the great things about Pokemon GO is, whereas in other games, you lean on your online community to do that, in Pokemon GO, we foster this friendly in-person environment where people can teach each other.
Q: I want to get back to the Super Mega Raids. There are so many Mega Pokemon that exist already, but then there are also Megas that were introduced in Legends Z-A. What’s the conversation as far as going back versus going forward with Super Mega Raids?
A: The way that we typically approach things in Pokemon GO is we really like to be data-driven in how we schedule out the live part of our game. So, we’re going to wait and see how players react to this system, what the appetite is, and that will help us define what’s the cadence of new Mega Pokemon we want to introduce to the game, what’s the cadence of re-featuring of old Mega Pokemon.
I’m already seeing some assumptions from players that the previously released Megas will only have their Level 4 Mega unlocked on another raid day for that Pokemon. That’s not something that we’ve determined yet, actually. There might be a world in which the previous Mega Level 4s are unlocked through other means in the future. We never want to come out with a fully baked plan. You never know how players are going to respond to things, and we want to be a little bit adaptive to that.
Q: Would you say that moving forward any new Megas would be Level 4?
A: That is probably a safe assumption to make. The current plan is if we are going to introduce a new Mega, we do want that to have the most exciting, highest level available, but things could change.
Q: Alongside the Super Mega Raids was the Link Charges. I’m sure you’ve seen conversations one way or the other, it being player-friendly but also maybe prohibitive. What are the conversations happening in terms of what you’re seeing from feedback on that?
A: The intent with Link Charges was actually to give players even more free opportunities to engage with the Mega Raid system. But what’s important to us is, if you’re going to interact with this system more for free, we do want that to be in person. So, I think some of the more critical parts of the feedback that we have been seeing is the addition of that currency for just remote raiding, the new Super Mega Raid battles, and that is by design. We want there to be a value differential to go in person, and we have seen in-person communities really explode in sheer volume over the past several years because we’ve leaned in like this and things like Dynamax and Gigantamax.
But at the same time, we know that players also still have a hunger and a desire to maybe participate remotely in stuff. So, it’s not something that we wanted to completely remove from the equation, but we did want to lean more heavily into the in-person stuff. I think the other thing I would say in terms of the feedback that I’ve seen so far is the feature’s been live for two days, so if I could say anything to our players, it’d be, “Let’s actually engage with this over the course of the next several weeks and months and then let us know how you’re feeling about this, because right now, you haven’t seen the full picture yet.
Q: Would you say that it’s fair to say there will be feedback and if it doesn’t work out, there will be changes made? Is that on the table?
A: We definitely want to be responsive to player behavior, and if we’re seeing that maybe the tuning of this isn’t quite right, we definitely want to reserve the right to make adjustments over time.
The Next Decade of Pokemon GO: Anniversary, PvP, and a Multi-Generational Vision
Q: Obviously, it’s a big anniversary year for the brand overall. So, what are the conversations like for Pokemon GO as far as making this a memorable year, not just for the game’s anniversary, but also for the brand’s anniversary?
A: As someone who’s been thinking about and working on our 10-year anniversary plans for the last two-and-a-half, three years, this is definitely going to be a big moment for us. There’s nothing specific that I can share right now, but I’m very much looking forward to this summer. I think our players have a lot to be excited about.
We have our annual GO Fest experience taking place over the course of late May through June. Our anniversary itself is in July. There’s the Pokemon XP experience in San Francisco in August. So, there’s just so much that a Pokemon fan has to be excited about coming up and those are only the things that you know people know about right now. I think this is going to be a massive, massive year for Pokemon GO fans and just Pokemon fans more broadly.
Q: What are some things that you’re looking at or the team is looking at and saying, “We could do better on this, or we love where this is.”
A: Because the 10-year anniversary is this year, we have not only been thinking about what we are doing in 2026, but this has been a nice moment for us to stop and think about what the next decade of Pokemon GO looks like. And there are hardly any games out there that have been as durable as Pokemon GO, for a full decade to have such a thriving community worldwide. And we want that to continue. We’ve talked about this being a forever game, and that means that 10 years isn’t enough. We want the next 20 years, 30 years.
Something that’s top of mind for me personally is, with Pokemon GO being one of the most family-friendly games out there, I want to think about what it truly means to be a multi-generational game. If you started playing the game in your teens, you’ll now be in your 20s. 10 years from now, you’ll be in your 30s. People who grew up with this game will start to have families of their own, which is just so beautiful for me to see. I have a two-year-old at home myself and a two-month-old, so it’s a very personal thing for me too. But I want to have a game that we can play together as a family over generations.
Q: How do you keep things balanced, as far as challenge and skill goes, for both new and veteran Pokemon GO players?
A: That’s probably the hardest part about a game that’s been around as long as we have. And not only that we’ve been around for 10 years, but just the sheer variety of players that we have in the game is vast. If you look around here at the beautiful Rose Bowl, you’ll see all walks of life—all ages, all backgrounds, and every person has something that they really love about the game that can be very different from what another person really loves about the game. So, trying to build an ecosystem that supports all of these people is very, very challenging.
I will say, I personally don’t think we have the right balance right now. And something that we’re really trying to think about as a team is what that new user experience looks like. When you see the Dynamax on the map, and you just can’t beat it, that’s frustrating. So, we really want to improve that, and it’s going to be a major focus for us over the coming years—how we make a game that’s even more welcoming to new players and players who maybe played in 2016 and are coming back to the game for the first time in a decade.
Q: Recently, there have been some pretty welcome quality-of-life changes. Are there things that the team is looking at specifically that you think you could do better?
A: Over 10 years, we’ve added so much to the game, it can feel a little intimidating or jarring to new players, and we definitely plan to continue making UI improvements to the product and a lot of it will be in service of ensuring that first-time or returning Pokemon GO experience is as smooth as possible.
Q: Do you want to mention the PVP system revamp that is going on right now?
A: It’s, in my humble opinion, a technical marvel, what we’ve been able to put together with the PvP battle system. You’re talking about players all over the world connecting to each other on different levels of connectivity, different devices, new and old, and they’re battling each other in a quick, fast-paced environment of like half-second turns. And that has been something that our players are very passionate about, but it’s been technically very challenging for us since the feature launched in order to create something that is a smooth and reliable experience no matter where you are.
So, we recently just invested a considerable amount of engineering resourcing to basically rearchitect the entire PVP system. Not necessarily UI improvements to that, but even things under the hood in order to make things smoother and feel more fair as players are playing or something like that.
Q: One of the things explained for Season 22 was maybe potentially moving away from everything being so ticket-based and more pass-based. Is that accurate?
A: Yeah, that is accurate. Something that we’re looking to do as a team is if you look at all the events and live ops that we have in the game, it can be quite confusing. It’s hard to know when something is happening, so we’re making a much more concerted effort around creating a more predictable cadence of experiences in the game. Maybe every first Saturday of the month is going to be Community Day, so you know exactly when that’s going to be coming.
And as part of that, we are hoping to lean a little bit less heavily on ticketed experiences in the game, because we do think the GO Pass has been a really great addition that helps players progress at the pace that they want to, and unlock great rewards through that. And also what is nice about the GO Pass feature is that there is a free track and a paid track, so even if you don’t want to spend in the game, you still have lots of great content that you can unlock through engaging in that for free. So, I think players can expect to see more of an emphasis on GO Pass in the future and I think that is a great benefit to players.
Q: What do you personally hope that players look forward to the most in Pokemon GO?
A: It’s almost become a little bit of a meme online that when Pokemon GO came out in 2016 was the last time we had world peace. I think that that type of magic hasn’t gone away in Pokemon GO. So, what I would like for players to look forward to is knowing that if you play this game, if you’re part of this community, that’s the type of feeling that we try to foster every day through the game. And that’s my personal commitment to our players, that I want to continue finding ways to make it feel like when you play Pokemon GO, you are part of this oasis where everybody is just in this super positive community together where you can help each other out and break through some of the challenges that you might be experiencing in the real world outside.
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- Released
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July 6, 2016
- Engine
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Unity
- Multiplayer
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Online Multiplayer, Online Co-Op
