Niantic is too afraid to move fast and break things, as a famous robot once put it. They started with an interactive game that included location based chat and

Niantic is too afraid to move fast and break things, as a famous robot once put it. They started with an interactive game that included location based chat and ultimately even made way for the ability to track players actions on an intel map. They then immediately became afraid of the implications of their own creation and have spent the last 10 years backtracking. Pokemon Go never had a chat. They imposed all manner of restrictions to try to stop people from playing while driving, and, in doing so, also basically hobbled players who use bicycles (because of speed constraints). Harry Potter...well, they handed far too much control to WB, who didn't know the first thing about this sort of game design, and got left with a mess nobody wanted to play. And then there's Pikmin, which I frankly was excited for when I heard it announced, as the console games were a pretty neat concept that I didn't think got nearly the attention they deserved. There's almost no game whatsoever. Next to ZERO interaction with other players (fine...you can see flowers they plant). It's a glorified pedometer app. I'm not sure if it's an overly cautious legal team they're dealing with or what, but someone should remind John Hanke that start ups don't break through by playing it safe. And to boot, casual players aren't the ones that dump money into games. Maybe they need to add age verification in to satisfy the lawyers before making a game that's actually fun to play, but this backing away from doing what they're in the business of doing is sad to watch and frankly pretty pathetic.