An ex-employee of Niantic has gone into great detail alleging higher-ups at the company turn a blind ear to complaints from players about Pokémon GO.
As Pokémon GO's fourth birthday creeps ever closer, the venture has to be considered a great success. The game has been downloaded millions of times and continues to make Niantic buckets of cash every year. It is even handling the current global pandemic very well. However, as with any game, Pokémon GO has its flaws.
The only hope that reasonable players of any game can have when they find something about it they don't like is voice their concerns and hope the developers are listening. According to a former Niantic employee, that is far from the case when it comes to Pokémon GO. The unnamed employee claims it to be quite the opposite at Niantic, reports Future Game Releases.
In fact, the ex-employee alleges that higher-ups at Niantic outright refuse to listen to negative comments about its precious Pokémon GO. They claim to have been punished for bringing issues being discussed online by players to the company, citing that they need to be fixed. Those problems included the time-consuming nature of sending gifts to friends every single day, and exclusive moves rendering the same Pokémon caught previously useless.
When the employee approached their bosses with relatively simple fixes for solutions that needed to be addressed, their annual performance score of 4.0 fell to a 2.5 with little-to-no explanation as to why. They claim to have been told to shut up and that it wasn't helpful to offer up solutions, even though they offered to help put those solutions into practice alongside other projects they were already working on.
Other examples the employee offered up include the amount of time put into the AR buddy system which was rolled out in 2019. While a fun novelty, it's a feature that isn't used by many players — at least not extensively — yet it took a lot of effort from Niantic engineers behind the scenes. They also highlight the Salamis island issue, where Pokémon wouldn't spawn, which wasn't addressed by Niantic until it gained negative attention in the press.
Source: Future Game Releases