Three Major Updates Are Coming To Pokemon GO In 2017, According To Niantic CEO John Hanke

Yesterday morning, Niantic CEO John Hanke took to the stage of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, and spoke about all things AR (Augmented Reality), Ingress (Niantic’s other AR game), the company’s future, and of course, Pokemon GO. You can watch the full speech here.

And while Hanke’s speech was interesting from start to finish, it was the final few minutes that really had players buzzing for the future of Pokemon GO. Around 20 minutes into his speech, Hanke revealed that Niantic have “three major new releases for Pokemon GO mapped out for this year.”

“And finally with Pokemon GO, we’re only getting started with the game. We just launched our first major update of 2017; we introduced 80 new Pokemon into the game and we have three major new releases for Pokemon GO mapped out for this year,” Hanke announced.

Hanke continued; “So Pokemon GO we expect to continue to be a healthy and growing project for many years, but we’re also working on a number of new AR gaming projects…We’ll be launching a new version of our original game Ingress later this year, and we have some other projects that unfortunately I can’t talk about today.”

As Dronpes from The Silph Road noted, it’s good that Hanke refers to the Gen 2 update as the “first major update” since the game was released, automatically qualifying all other updates as “minor” in comparison. This means we could expect future “major” releases to be just as epic and content-heavy as the Gen 2 update was.

Now that we know there are three major updates coming to Pokemon GO this year, trainers all over the world are wondering exactly what is in store for us. Could one of the three updates be trading? Or, maybe it’s breeding? How about a complete gym overhaul and the implementation of a PvP system?

Some of the folks over at The Silph Road are speculating that one of the three updates could even be a Gen 3 release, reminding us that there was a 7 month gap between Pokemon GO’s release and the Gen 2 update. If Niantic continue with this pacing, we could see Gen 3 being released around September or October.

But what do you think the three major updates of 2017 will be? Do you think it’ll be the legendary Pokemon? Trading? PvP? Breeding? Let me know what you think the three major updates will be in the comment section below!

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