Former Pokemon Go employee accuses Niantic of ignoring highly requested changes

A former Niantic employee has revealed that the people in charge of the company made a sport of rejecting quality-of-life improvements that Pokemon Go fans consistently called for.

Pokemon Go is one of the most popular mobile games in the industry, and despite that, the player community is often at odds with Niantic. Most of the time, the company has taken measures to keep the player base happy with a great deal of content drops, especially during the last season: Adventures Abound.

But former Niantic employees who submitted Glassdoor reviews, state that management at the company is allegedly “responsible for the quality of life drops” in Pokemon Go, and some called out the higher echelons for “blatantly ignoring players’s needs and suggestions to improve the game.”

Another of the reviews suggests that the company has: “Some of the most misguided leadership (especially at exec level) and a lot of poor product managers.”

Former Niantic employees claim poor management hindered Pokemon Go progress

However, not all the reviews were bad. Many of the reviews that can be found claim Niantic is a “great place to work if you are a fan of Pokemon,” and “full of kind and helpful people.”

It would seem that the problem doesn’t lie with the employees in charge of developing new assets, but instead, with the people in charge of deciding what is released and what is not.

This is not the first time that someone has pointed to Niantic’s management for the current status of the game. According to older reviews you can find on Glassdoor, some bad decisions like leaving out 8 Gen starters and going directly to Gen 9, were all orders from the upper floors.

Players feel many of the positive changes that were made during the pandemic were not only reverted but made worse. The rise in the price of Remote Passes, the reduction of interaction distance with Poke Stops, and the player’s trade distance have been majorly unpopular within the Pokemon Go community.

This reception from Pokemon Go fans has impacted the active player count. Even now, players are furious with the release of a Routes-focused event that they are not able to complete due to the lack of Routes.

We will have to wait and see if things end up well for Pokemon Go and the company in charge of its development. In the meantime, we can keep enjoying the game with the upcoming Azurill Hatch Day Event, and the next Timburr Community Day.