Pokemon GO: all the updates shared by Niantic CEO this week

By Chris Burns/March 1, 2017 9:59 am EST

Niantic CEO John Hanke spoke at Mobile World Congress today about Pokemon GO with a brief barrage of facts. He began his chat speaking about how unexpected the game's success was. "It was probably the worst job of forecasting of my career," said Hanke, referring to the relatively large number of times Niantic servers were down in the first few weeks after Pokemon GO launched and millions of players logged on.

What can we learn from what Hanke said today, as Pokemon GO players? That Pokemon GO isn't going away any time soon. Hanke recently suggested that they'd already made so much money from Pokemon GO in the first year alone that they'd be able to keep developing for years to come – they could stop charging money for the game now, and keep developing and releasing updates for years into the future.

They won't do that, of course – it makes more sense to continue running with a winning business model. As such, the in-game purchases will continue, and the sponsorships will continue. Staying on-point with PokeStops on public places like libraries will continue, too.

As you'll see at the head of this article, it was (and remains) no odd sight to see signs like these outside libraries over the past year. Many libraries have PokeStops and/or Pokemon Gyms placed on them automatically – and libraries have been MORE than welcoming of new patrons coming in amongst the books. They've got Pokemon books there too, after all.

Some facts shared by Hanke are shared below – these were all spoken by Hanke at MWC 2017 on February 28th, 2017.

• 8.7-billion kilometers walked by Pokemon GO users

• 88-billion Pokemon caught

• 44,600 TB of data have been transferred

• 650-million downloads of Pokemon GO

Sponsored Pokemon GO PokeStops statistics:

• 500-million visits to sponsored locations via Pokemon GO

• 13k Starbucks locations

• 2k Jio locatiosn

• 10k Sprint locations

Hanke mentioned that Gen 2 – the release that happened last month – was the first "major" update to Pokemon GO. Hanke suggested that they have 3 major new releases for Pokemon GO mapped out for the year – so that's either 2 or 3 still coming. Can't wait! Stick around our @TeamPokemonGO Twitter portal to see more as it happens!