Pokémon Go has been available in many territories for nearly a month now, and there are a few players who have already caught ’em all. By “’em all,” we mean all the Pokémon that are available in the game at the moment, which isn’t all the Pokémon that exist. Right now, Ditto, Mew, Mewtwo, Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres cannot be caught in the game, but Niantic CEO John Hanke recently said that these creatures might be available soon enough via special events.
“Well there are a number of threads that you will start to see,” he told Forbes. “You will see new Pokémon come into the game around special events at certain times in certain parts of the world. You’ll see us do some things around events. We initially thought that we would organize events ourselves like we did for Ingress. We’ll see if we do or not. There are a lot of self-organizing events that are happening and maybe we just support those.”
Hanke also talked about how in-game sponsorships will feel natural, and that the money they bring in should reduce the need for in-app purchases.
“The idea with real world games was to build an advertising model that is deeply tied to the way the game itself works… so it doesn’t break the flow of the game,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like something is grafted on. That’s what we’re trying to do and it will provide a compliment to in-app purchase. In app-purchase will be the majority of the revenue, but it does take some of the pressure off of us to squeeze hard on the purchase side which would be detrimental to the game.”
By the way, Hanke doesn’t seem to mind people “cheating” in the game either, so long as that cheating doesn’t violate the game’s terms of service, like the third-party tracking services that recently got shut down. He’s not as opposed to people hatching eggs in novel ways, though, like by using a toy train track: “Hah! To hatch his eggs? Well that’s kind of cheating, but it’s kind of creative and funny too so I don’t really mind it. He’s only cheating himself.”
Read the rest of the interview here, and speculate in the comments about what these “special events” are going to be like.
Featured image: Niantic/The Pokémon Company
