John Hanke, CEO of Niantic Labs, the maker of Pokémon Go.
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Pokémon Go chief promises player battles, live events, more creatures, and stable servers

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 11 min

Niantic Labs has done the impossible launching its Pokémon Go mobile game, scoring more than 500 million downloads in two months. It has stabilized its server capacity and generated an estimated $500 million in revenue.

Yet it has done so with a team of just 70 or so people in San Francisco. But fans are saying they’re getting bored and want more. Slice Intelligence reported that 79 percent of the paying audience in the U.S. has stopped playing.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.