Legendary Pokemon, PvP Coming to Pokemon Go

"The game can sustain itself if we are able to create social interactions amongst players."

By Vikki Blake

Player-versus-player (PvP) and Legendary Pokemon are coming to Pokemon Go later this year.

In an interview with Brazilian newspaper O Globo (thanks, Go Nintendo), Niantic's VP of strategic partnerships, Mathieu de Fayet, announced that competitive play was just one of the things developer Niantic has planned to keep its 65 million active players hooked to the augmented reality game.

"Pokémon Go has been downloaded 650 million times, but now it has 65 million active players. How do you keep players interested in the game?" said de Fayet.

"Due to the large success of the game, we had to delay some planned innovations. Right now we are working on some that are due to hit this summer (in the northern hemisphere), such as giving more value to the choice of the teams, releasing Legendary Pokemon and introducing PvP. One thing we learned with Ingress was that the game can sustain itself if we are able to create social interactions amongst players, and we are working on that."

Although we're not hearing as much about the game as when the craze began last year, last month the game hit 65 million monthly active users.

In February, Pokémon Go passed 650 million downloads and last week, developer Niantic announced plans to crack down on cheaters.

Vikki Blake is a very jumpy survival horror survivalist. You can find her twittering over at @_vixx and twitching at twitch.tv/vixxiie.

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