Niantic Culture
I have seen many posts on blind regarding the bad leadership, how does the eng scene look there? From the people I interviewed with they all seem pretty nice and enjoyed their work, but I don’t know how it really is within the company. Can anyone share the thoughts? If I want to work for the pogo team, would the culture be pretty bad there and always need to work overtime like a sweat shop? Thanks for any advice in advance.
Culture is better on non game teams in general at this company, needs will vary by sprint. Sometimes the work life balance is healthy, other times there will be whole teams working 12+ hours a day to meet a deadline. There’s usually no crunch, but it still happens here and there. We have many people quitting and are slow to hire, we are mostly backfilling roles now from people who quit. Roadmap and direction from leadership is very volatile, it’s not unusual that projects get killed or postponed indefinitely after engineers already started work on them.
Thanks for the input, I’m curious if people are leaving how they can backfill those positions? Btw do you have any recommendation for the team? I think the main motivation for me to join the company was because of Pokemon go, not sure about other products( I think Harry Potter is dying?)
It looks like the social, platform, and AR teams have better WLB and team cultures. Pokémon GO is still a healthy product, Harry Potter as a franchise just isn’t as popular as Pokémon. Game teams in general are just heavily understaffed at the company, Niantic is more focused on success with their platform and AR tooling and so most resources go in that direction. Our games are buggy and get new features at a slow rate because our company leadership just overall is more invested in business outside of our own game titles. Being understaffed doesn’t allow for a lot of housekeeping on our game which leads to quality declining significantly. If you get a good offer and Pokémon is important to you, it’s still worth taking. People here are nice, smart, super creative, and engineers even get a lot of say about new features to work on and the product direction of the game. But if you’re hoping to work on some groundbreaking new features, or anything that would significantly improve the game, you will be disappointed by how rare that is.
All I can say is, as a once avid Pokemon Go player, what they've done to the game and to the community is beyond disappointing. They had all the opportunity in the world to build up one of the largest gaming communities this world has ever seen. But alas, take a look at app annie or any other MAU dashboards of the game. It's only core whale players left; and even the whale players and influencers are actively renouncing the game on YouTube and leaving the game. Hell myself included. This company seems blind (or braindead) to the requests of the community. They say "listen carefully to your customers as their whispers will tell you what to build next". In this case, the community is taking a megaphone and blaring it. Influencers actually banded together and staged a strike on YT where major influencers banded together to promote their communities to stop paying for microtransactions until the company fixes core game bugs. Guess what the company did? It doubled down on its AR efforts that absolutely NOBODY asked for, mostly ignored the requests of the community (especially around Go Battle League), and pretended nothing happened. Look we get it; you need to sell the whole "metaverse" play to your investors to get funding and boost your valuations and make your employees happy. But the fact of the matter is, your strategy makes absolutely no sense. This game has succeeded IN SPITE of , NOT because of, the game's shitty AR features; no pokemon go player goes out into the wild, takes out their phones, and say "how cool! i can see pikachu at my feet!". The first thing players do is turn off the game's AR features. And in spite of all the shitty in game bonuses you can get for turning on your AR features; its mostly an ignored feature. So the whole thesis of your "massive player base" going out to "map the world" for you; is absolute nonsense. And so now, you have this company that was given this hot once in a lifetime chance to build something good with the most exclusive ip in the world, who openly threw the opportunity into a trashbin, and stomped on it a few times for good measures. They haven't produced a single success outside of Pogo; the Harry Potter game was dog shit btw; and Ingress. Well Ingress hasn't changed much since it first came out. They haven't produced a single success outside of Pogo; and it's not a mystery why. I'm ranting now and I'll stop whining. But I was honestly once a huge fan of the game and spent a lot of time and dollars raiding, catching, battling and defending gyms, and most especially at GBL where I grinded through the ranks to Legend. Yeah; at a certain point in time, I just couldn't take that shit anymore and hard uninstalled my game and asked Niantic to delete my account.
I feel you man! There are next to zero QoL improvements to the game. It clunky, there is no excitement or new features that you pushes you to play. Its just bleh now. Megas failed, VR failed, now they have snapshot and journal which is also dumb. Its a disappointment. I’m still grinding from L42 to L43, but I just can’t anymore.
Same opinion. As an engineer here I used to desperately want to improve the game QOL, and many others do too. Execs doesn't align with that though, so we have to do it in our "free time". Eventually I got tired of fighting though, and now I just work on whatever I'm told to.
I joined recently. The culture is great, eng is equal partner with pm and UX. It probably depends on the manager, but they seem to support a healthy work life balance. The ceo is inspiring almost everyone. Very talented people with passion and motivation. So far, super happy I joined.
What team are you in? I think my concern is the growth part, how do you value the upside of Niantic right now when it sits at 9b valuation? Even for acquisition I think it’s huge amount (around 1/7 blizzard’s acquisition value while I don’t think Niantic is 1/7 blizzard)
They keep running a perfectly good game PokemonGo to the ground by building upon bugs and not addressing them. Speaking as a customer, they’re ruining my favorite passtime.
+1 on it, I think there are lots of things to fix and once a bug is getting fixed the other surfaces
Just as an FYI, PokemonGo mayne healthy as of now, but none of their new additions/features in the game have caught any traction. Additionally there is a lot of movement in the community to go FTP. It might not be 100%, but I’ve definitely seen people spending less on the game.