Online Trading “Will Not be Coming to Pokémon GO!”

Just in case there wasn’t enough Pokémon GO related news coming out from the Game Developer Conference (GDC), there’s now even more news for us to shove down your throats now that Polygon had the chance to talk with Senior Product Manager Tatsuo Nomura.

So just what exactly got said? Well Nomura more than just hinted at trading being something that can only be done locally in Pokémon GO, but that might change, as Niantic are trying to come up with an answer that won’t “kill the game.”  You can find a quick round-up of Nomura’s full comments below.

Nomura on Trading Locally:

“[Trading] won’t be through the internet. You shouldn’t be able to exchange your Pokémon with someone who is 100 miles away from you. … The person needs to be in your proximity.”

Nomura on Pokémon GO not being an “Online game that you can just exchange virtually:”

“I wasn’t really thinking of trading as a way to solve the local area spawn issue. That was more, we have a couple Pokémon that only spawn in a couple regions, and that was the hope, that some Pokémon you have to know someone or find someone who lives in certain regions and meet and exchange. We don’t want to just have that be an online game that you can just exchange virtually.”

Nomura on more Pokémon Appearing in-game: 

“The last couple of months, we updated our data set so that hiking trails that are more often found in local areas have more Pokémon.”

Nomura on not killing the Game:

“We’re still trying to come up with an answer [to trading] that makes sense so it doesn’t kill the game. If we fail this, we can easily kill the game.”

While that does conclude what was said to Polygon, for anyone requiring a refresher with regards to the other stuff that emerged from GDC, here’s a quick recap. It was revealed that the trainers designs was to originally be based on Brendan and May from Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire, but was then changed to the designs we know now. There were plans to display real-time weather such as being cloudy (overcast) and there was even plans of doing a transition from day to night.

Niantic have also confirmed that they are intending to make both features happen in the game and since we’ve heard them previously tease they will be doing 3 big updates this year, this is quite possibly one, if not two of them. Lastly, it was also reconfirmed they still intend to host big events where people can gather.

As soon as we hear anything else trading related, we’ll be back to provide a follow-up as always.

Source: Polygon