After having recently entered into a deal with Niantic to acquire its game development business, Scopely has seemingly no plans to bring in obstructive additions to titles like Pokémon Go to further increase revenue. Speaking to Polygon, Pokémon Go senior product director Michael Steranka said that the studio doesn’t want to change what made the game a success to begin with.
When asked whether games like Pokémon Go will see things like advertisements or obstructive game mechanics, like an energy bar that drains every time the game is played, with more energy being available for purchase, Steranka said no. For context, these kinds of things are present in many smartphone games, especially if they’re free-to-play.
“If there’s one takeaway that I would love for people to have from this conversation, it’s that definitively no, that is not happening in Pokémon Go – not now, not ever,” Steranka said.
“Again, Scopely really recognises how unique this game is, and they’ve told us themselves that they would be foolish to try to change the recipe of what’s made this such a huge hit and a success. So yeah, absolutely not. We will not be building into our games any type of obtrusive ads or anything like that.”
“I just really want to reiterate Scopely as a company, the way that they operate is they give all of their teams the agency to make the decisions that’s right for their games. And that is not something that we feel would ever be right for Pokémon Go.”
Steranka also said that, while Scopely will be running the development team for Pokémon Go, the game will not be selling any of the data it collects from players to third parties. He reiterates that the only reason Pokémon Go needs a player’s location data is to make sure that the game runs properly.
“We do not sell player data to third parties, full stop,” said Steranka. “We only leverage location data to operate the game, and we store any location data needed to operate the game on US-based servers, and we follow all of the incredibly strict regulatory best practices to protect that data as best as we can.”
Scopely’s acquisition of the development team behind Pokémon Go, along with the teams working on Pikmin Bloom and Monster Hunter Now, was announced earlier this month. Alongside the development teams, Scopely has also acquired the licenses to run these titles.
As for Niantic itself, the company plans on continue running its own AR games, namely Ingress Prime and Peridot. The company plans to spin off its technology-based holdings into a new company dubbed Niantic Spatial Inc. This company will be helmed by Niantic founder and CEO John Hanke.
In a statement released alongside the announcement of the acquisition, Scopely told Pokémon Go, Pikmin Bloom and Monster Hunter Now players that it admires the audience that the titles have built up, and that Scopely wants to continue supporting the developers in making the games how they want.
“We believe our partnership with the Niantic games team – who will all join Scopely through this acquisition – will further enable them to achieve their exciting long-term goals, which are designed first and foremost with you in mind,” said the company.
