Niantic Plans to Have a Huge Pokémon Go Update for December

Niantic Labs is reportedly planning a huge Pokémon Go update for December that will give players a lot of what they’ve been asking for.

The update will include more than 100 new normal and Legendary Pokémon, player-versus-player battles, raising your critters (like Tamagotchi pets, after the eggs hatch), and trading between players, according to an analysis of the hit mobile game’s code by people associated with web scanner PokeVS. If true, that could set Pokémon Go for an explosive comeback during the critical holiday season. Among the new Legendary Pokémon is Mew and Mewtwo (the latter appeared as the enemy in the original Pokémon Go video in September 2015).

So far, only Ditto has been released. We can’t be sure if the update will come all at once or over time, but the evidence is there. PokeVS showed before-and-after comparisons of the code that indicated where the updates are expected to be implemented. This code could change, but as it is, it shows what’s coming.

Pokémon Go has already been the most successful mobile game in history, generating more than 500 million downloads and an estimated $600 million in revenues in its first 90 days after its launch in July. But the activity in the game has died down, and many players have stopped playing. That’s in part because players wanted the updated features mentioned above in order to give them a reason to keep playing.

San Francisco-based Niantic hasn’t commented on the possible update, but John Hanke, CEO of Niantic, has repeatedly said that all of those features — as well as real world events — are coming in the future. I would have thought those features would comes slowly, one by one. But PokeVS claims that those features in the upcoming update. A spokesperson for Niantic said the “Gen 2” is coming as an update, but there’s no more information than that.

PokeVS also provides tools to share Pokémon locations on social media, as well as a link to Google Maps that contain the exact location of each Pokémon creature, giving users the ability to find rare creatures.

Here’s a list of all of the creatures that are expected to be available after the coming update goes live. The first 150 or so are already in the game, and the following 100 are new: