Niantic Teases New Ways To Play Together In 'Pokémon Go' This Fall

Niantic has revealed that its new social feature for “Pokémon Go” helped in increasing its active users. The mobile game developer also said that its planning to bring in new features this fall that are going to function on top of the existing social features.

In the last few months, Niantic added a bunch of new features to “Pokémon Go,” including the ability to add friends and trade creatures. These are the most requested features for the augmented reality game and their addition naturally convinced a lot of trainers to go back to playing “Pokémon Go” again. The addition of the social features appears to be successful because Niantic saw a big increase in daily active users.

“Over the summer, tens of millions of Trainers around the world played Pokémon GO together every month, with a 35% increase in active usage since May,” Niantic CEO John Hanke said in a blog post. “Since we introduced the new Social features at the end of June, more than 113 million Friend connections have been made and 2.2 billion Gifts have been sent to friends, showcasing how Trainers truly enjoy interacting with one another and playing together.”

Hanke also revealed that Niantic is planning to take things further by strengthening social engagement in “Pokémon Go.” The developer is now working alongside the Knight Foundation for a host of programs to tie AR games to civic engagement. Niantic also has a fellowship program that will provide community leaders with tools to integrate “Pokémon Go” into open street events in cities across the United States.

The Niantic CEO also teased that even more new features will be added to “Pokémon Go” later this fall. Hanke didn’t provide any specifics as to what those are, but he did say that Niantic is “working on some surprises for ‘Pokémon Go’ this fall to give trainers even more ways to play together.”

Niantic may be planning on adding even more creatures to capture in “Pokémon Go,” which may be what Hanke was referring to when talking about some surprises for trainers, as pointed out by GameSpot. Niantic did tease back in July that it will be adding Gen 4 Pokémon to the game soon. It would also make a lot of sense that Niantic would add even more social features to "Pokémon Go" since it may help in the continuous growth of active users.

Hanke also reminded fans that Niantic will be celebrating the sixth anniversary of “Ingress,” the developer’s other AR mobile game. Niantic will be adding improvements to “Ingress” by incorporating the Niantic Real World Platform. Finally, Hanke said that Niantic is still hard at work on developing the “Harry Potter: Wizards Unite” AR game for mobile.