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'Pokémon GO' Update: Trading System, PvP Battles Coming Soon; Nearby Tracker Test Ending?

'Pokémon GO' Update: Trading System, PvP Battles Coming Soon; Nearby Tracker Test Ending?

J Rose

Niantic Labs is set to bring more features to the popular augmented-reality mobile game "Pokémon GO" soon, according to a recent interview.

Speaking on the latest episode of the Recode Decode podcast, Niantic Labs CEO John Hanke acknowledged that the team has a lot of work to do on the game, following its massively successful launch.

"It's been a busy two months," Hanke said, "so we're now happy that we're kind of stabilized and able to start being a little more thoughtful about the next set of features that we want to build."

Hanke then went on to say that Niantic is planning to release the much awaited Trading system for the game next. The Niantic CEO also said the same thing during TechCrunch's DisruptSF 2016.

Hanke also said that a PvP battle system is also something that the team is considering in future updates.

"I have 10 year old son - he's my Pokémon expert, we play together - he wants to battle his friends in Pokémon Go," Hanke said during the TechCrunch event. "Battling is something we talk a lot about. It's probably something that will make its way onto our roadmap."

Hanke did not specify when these changes will be coming, although he did mention that these changes are "just the tip of an iceberg" compared to what the developer has planned for the game.

"A lot of what we're doing with Pokémon, we learned through three years of hard work with Ingress and building up that community around the world, maturing that technology, the social aspect of it, the group gameplay, and the events for Ingress are really the lifeblood of that game," Hanke said. "I think you can expect to see things like that in Pokémon Go."

In other news, it looks like Niantic has finished testing the new nearby tracker system. According to Pokémon GO Hub, Upsight, a mobile marketing and user behavior tracking platform, was recently removed from "Pokémon GO"'s source code.

The removal of the user behavior tracking platform from the code may signal that the testing is already finished, and the new tracker may now be awaiting stress and infrastructure testing.

Stay tuned for more "Pokémon GO" news.

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