Niantic was one of few mobile game makers who turned up in force at last month’s Summer Game Fest.
The Scopely-owned studio was mostly there to talk to the consumer press about Monster Hunter Now’s new season. But we got some time with Niantic executive producer Carl Damerow and senior marketing director Dan Inamoto to cover what’s happening at the studio in general, not long after the ink dried on Scopely’s $3.5bn acquisition of Niantic’s games business.
Below, we talk through what might change under the new ownership, Pokémon Go’s explosive launch and why Harry Potter: Wizards Unite didn’t quite work out.
And after successful collabs with The Pokémon Company, Capcom and Nintendo, Niantic also suggests it is on the hunt for new partnerships…
The below conversation has been edited for clarity and readability.
What do you think will change about Niantic now you’re part of Scopely?
Carl Damerow: The mandate is keep doing what you’re doing and keep exploring this space. Going to Scopely is not going to change the DNA of location-based, play outside, play-with-others games, but we don’t want to just knock out the next one, so to speak. We want to figure out where else can this go.
Dan Inamoto: Scopely has been very clear that they’re not there to impact our games by any means. We continue to operate the games as we do. If anything, I think it would be a great help – they operate multiple games that are very successful, and so I think we can learn from them on how they run things, from a product development and operation standpoint as well as from a marketing standpoint, without changing the core of our games.
Damerow: It is early but it has been really fun to now be in a company that’s solely focused on making mobile games from the top to the bottom. The executives know what they’re talking about when it comes to games. The message has been welcome in, keep doing what you’re doing, let’s keep the employees happy, let’s keep the players happy. So it’s been great.
Carl you were at Niantic when it spun out of Google and launched Pokémon Go. What are your memories of when that game blew up?
Damerow: We had spun out of Google officially in October of 2015 and that was a bit of a leap of faith, because Pokémon Go was not in the bag. Tatsuo Nomura had partnered with the Pokémon Company for an April Fools to find Pokémon in Google Maps, and Tatsuo had developed a relationship with Pokémon Company – he’s a brilliant guy.
At the same time, Google didn’t really know what to do with Niantic Labs. So we spun out and that was an interesting time…we all felt like, Pokémon is a pretty big IP obviously, one of the biggest in the world. It was actually a very easy decision to walk because all of us here care about our mission. That’s not lip service – let’s get people outside, get people physically moving, get people connected…that mission has not changed in 10 years and it will not change.
Then that game launched July 6 2016, and was just 100 times our expectations. Luckily, we had come from Google, and we had a bat phone to Google Cloud being like… more! We need more servers!
It was a firefight for the first couple of months just to keep the game rolling. And it’s maybe still the fastest-growing game of all time? Hundreds of millions of downloads. It was just bonkers.
One of the benefits of Niantic Labs is most of the team had come from Google, which has a certain engineering pedigree that always has emphasised scale. And so I don’t think there’s another team in the world that could have even handled it after it blew up. And actually, Ed Wu, who is now the GM of Pokémon Go – he was the server lead at that time. So Ed is a consistent thread and he now runs the whole Pokémon Go business.
Scale was in the DNA of Google. I think if we had been a garage operation, I don’t know if we could have kept it running. But luckily, there was enough sophistication and thinking things through so that when the time came – I mean, it was a lot of late nights, don’t get me wrong, months of late nights – they seemed ready for the challenge. But no, nobody was really ready for that.
So after all of that why do you think the next Niantic game, Harry Potter Wizards Unite, didn’t work as well, while your Monster Hunter and Pikmin games have?
Damerow: Let me start with Monster Hunter, that’s one’s easy – the partnership was easy, the game was a no-brainer, because Monster Hunter from its inception 20 years ago is about hunting together. So this has always been a multiplayer hunting game.
Our thing [as Niantic] has always been ‘play together’. When our Tokyo team started that partnership with Capcom, we were like: yes, that’s what you do, that’s what we do…we try to make these 10 year games, which is maybe a little irregular in the mobile games business, our timelines for product development and road mapping are that we want to make 10 year-plus games.
Ingress is at 15 years. Pokémon Go is at 10 years next year, we are planning for Monster Hunter to be a 10 year game. Pikmin Bloom is at three years and counting. It’s where you play together and start to habituate.
In Ingress, for example, players have portal smashing every Wednesday and get together with their friends. Pokémon Go, you start to habituate, you build a habit of meeting with your friends. In Monster Hunter, we have a feature called paintballing where I can collect some monsters when we all get together on a Friday night and share them and play together, physically together.
I know that is some of our secret sauce – and it’s not secret, because we’re very proud of that.
And Harry Potter didn’t build that kind of community? Or is it a Japanese IP thing…?
Damerow: I mean, I thought it was a great game. There were some very hardcore Harry Potter Wizards Unite fans. And actually, a highlight of that game was we had an event in Indianapolis where, similar to Pokémon Go fest, or with Monster Hunter, where we had an event in Tokyo and Shibuya last fall. So we’re also kind of an events company, which is another irregularity. But this is part of why it’s special. It’s because you see everyone playing and reinforcing how fun it can be.
Are you out there looking for more IPs you can turn into geolocation games? What is it about Japanese game IP that seems to be working for you?
Damerow: That one’s probably we can say the least about, only because this has been such a wild summer. We’re just settling in [at Scopely] so to speak. So I know our near term focus is our three games. I probably don’t even want to surmise what’s coming other than we intend to be around for a long time…
Inamoto: We’ll see how things go… there are lots of interesting IPs out there, in Japan for sure there are lots of IPs that we could potentially work with, but elsewhere as well, who knows what’s going to happen…
