Niantic

People were genuinely so lovely and kind and helpful.

Lots of passion from fans around Pokémon Go so many years later.

Great environment if you're also a Pokémon fan!

Some of the most misguided leadership, especially at the exec level, and a lot of poor product managers. Working on a mobile game, no matter where you work, is soul-sucking. The entire premise of a mobile game is to intentionally leave in friction to make players pay to avoid it. It's scummy and awful.

I worked on Pokemon Go for about a year, and I really do believe PGO is one of the "better" mobile games out there, and it still made me never want to work on a mobile game ever again.

Multiple times I pitched new quality-of-life improvements for the game that were small, easy, and required no new art or designs. I got stopped every step of the way by either my own product manager or a business person, awaiting approval from partners.

All of their reasons were also based on "feel," not on any actual data to support the claims they made that my feature was a bad idea or would hurt revenue. They wouldn't even let me test it on a subset of players to prove my claim. This happened at least 2-3 times before I just said, "Forget it, I'm not coming up with, prototyping, demoing, and pitching new unique ideas at this company if they don't want to hear my ideas."

It was outstandingly infuriating.

If you are a game developer who cares a lot about making quality video games that respect and care about their players, I don't recommend working here or at any mobile game studio. If you're pretty indifferent about it but like games and Pokémon, you might be fine here.

Do, like, a lot better. Pretend you make a globally played product with tons and tons of players counting on you to make their favorite game good. Just because you lost favor with them a while ago doesn't mean you should dig the hole deeper.