Niantic is the most baffling company. I played the original ingress beta with my friends and it was actually pretty fun, it felt like you were playing a tech de

Niantic is the most baffling company. I played the original ingress beta with my friends and it was actually pretty fun, it felt like you were playing a tech demo, but for a tech demo it was engrossing. When they shut it down and announced they started developing a game based on the pokemon IP that was pretty exciting, but the final product they released was frankly embarassing. I know the "I could build a this in a weekend" trope is ridiculous, but from my memory it felt that after over a year of developing (and shutting down a successful game for that amount of time!) they released what was basically a reskin of Ingress with less engrossing gameplay. But the bafflement continued after that. Despite the bareness of the game it still had great success, except they failed to monetize it in any significant way, by the time they implemented half decent monetization their player base had already dropped by a factor hundred or something. Of course given the ludicrous amount of initial hype that meant there was still an insane amount of players and they still made crazy revenue. And judging from the stories of players who remained active their development pace never really picked up. I'd love to read war stories from those layed off. What happened inside that company that made it have such a seemingly weak game development pace despite being born from one of the worlds premier engineering firms. Was all of it spent on marketing and licensing the IP? Or spent on frivolous decoration like the fancy AR experience that mostly fizzled out? All things considered the game was still a great success, just baffling when imagining the things that could have been. In my mind they could have been bigger than Nintendo itself.