‘We’ll soon introduce six local languages, QSR partnerships’

livemint.com:

Edited excerpts: Why is Niantic entering India seven years after the launch of Pokémon Go? India has been a massive market for Android,and we are seeing fast adoption of new devices, with over 500 million active smartphone users. That is great for us, because for augmented reality, we need to have a graphics accelerator and advanced features in the phones. Today, you can find sub-$100 smartphones that have good enough features to match our needs, and within two years we may find similar features in sub-$50 phones, which will only expand the market.

We are doing this because we’re seeing immense fandom for the game in India. This is why we are making significant investments here, and over the past year, we’ve added over 5 million points of interest. We’ve been working up to this point for over a year now, and Hindi is only the first of the six Indian languages we’ll launch.

We have set up a team in India, through both direct and indirect association across Bengaluru and Mumbai, working on marketing and business development for Niantic. We’re also organizing community days within the game, and we’ve found people to be excited. Is the gamer base in India sizeable enough to warrant this move? India’s mobile gaming size is outstanding—500 million is an incredible user base.

This makes it a very competent and competitive market, and we wanted to ensure we had the right connections with communities to be able to tap into it. We also want to make sure we had the right devices to play the game. The Pokémon Co.

has established an India team and has plans to grow its fan base here. Later this month, we’ll be making key brand partnerships for the market. This will be with a quick-service retail (QSR) restaurant—to help us turn QSR