Niantic responds to fans’ open letter over Pokemon GO changes

Niantic officially responds to the Pokemon community and all the fans out there. Due to the recent changes in Pokemon GO, which affected players’ comfort of playing from home, Fans are furious on Niantic. The biggest Pokemon GO community Reddit handle r/SilphRoad, wrote an open letter to Niantic recently. And Niantic officially posted its response on its blog.

Firstly, Niantic feels very humbled by the community response. They say, “not every game has such a passionate, global player base”, and they’re ultimately happy and fortunate for that.

As the pandemic hit the world, Niantic decided to extend the PokéStop and Gym interaction distance from 40m to 80m. “Like everyone else around the world, our team has been working very hard to adapt to the global health environment,” said Niantic.

They later reverted to 40 meters as Niantic wants people to connect to real places in the real world and visit places worth exploring. However, the players were safe and comfortable playing in an increased radius especially considering the new Delta variant of COVID-19.

Niantic’s Response

Niantic said they have heard the Pokemon community’s inputs loud and clear. To address the concerns that fans raised, Niantic said they are taking the following actions:

We are assembling an internal cross-functional team to develop proposals designed to preserve our mission of inspiring people to explore the world together, while also addressing specific concerns that have been raised regarding interaction distance. We will share the findings of this task force by the next in-game season change (September 1). As part of this process, we will also be reaching out to community leaders in the coming days to join us in this dialogue.

– Niantic

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