Last week, Monopoly Go owner Scopely acquired of a bunch of games headlined by Pokemon Go from Niantic, thereby creating some kind of Saudi-backed terrifying Go-liath alliance. Naturally, there were a number of things that left players of the Pokemon game that was once totally unavoidable with some concerns, which one of its execs has aimed to nip in the bud with a recent interview.
In addition to some justified discomfort about Niantic having sold up to a publisher owned by Saudia Arabia’s controversial Savvy Games Group in the $3.5 billion deal, folks were worried it might be the harbinger of changes that’d bring some of the questionable advertising and monetisation practices Scopely’s other games are known for to Pokemon Go.
Pokemon Go’s senior vice president Ed Wu tried to extingish any fears in Ninantic’s announcement of the deal, and more of the same has come from the game’s senior product director Michael Steranka in a fresh chat with Polygon.
Asked if there are any plans for the game to have stuff like “intrusive ads that will interrupt gameplay” or playtime restrictions that could push folks towards paying to keep going, Steranka’s answer was “definitively no, that is not happening in Pokemon Go — not now, not ever”. So, basically the same response you’d get if you asked someone if they’d like to use the game to make it look like they were giving Pikachu the finger.
The exec went on to re-iterate pretty much what Wu said – Scopely good, Scopely thinks Pokemon Go good, Scopely not gonna mess up a good thing. It’s the message you’re getting at this point, though it’s up to you if you trust the company to stick to it.
Meanwhile, based on one of Steranka’s other answers, it sounds like Pokemon Go could be influencing some changes to Scopely’s games, rather than vice versa. “They’re really interested in the fact that Pokémon Go is such a stable business,” the exec said of the publisher, “but almost more than that, they’ve been really interested to try to learn from us and see what they can take from how we build Pokemon Go and apply that to potentially other games in their portfolio and future games to come as well.”
Will things actually play out that way in the long-term? It’s early days yet, so we’ll have to wait and see. One thing I do know is that Steranka at one point in the interview made a joke about Scopely not turning Pokemon Go into “Pokemon Stay at Home” due to this deal, and that might be the moment the concept comedy died.
Yes, it’s very rich of me – a notorious and unrelenting delivererer of utterly s**t jokes – to say that, but I’m doing it anyway.