Of course Niantic targets are casual players . Nowadays quantity is way more important tha anything else . There is no point for small companies to have 100 . 000 hardcore players . That won ' t attract big sponsors . Also for 10 milion $ income those players need to spend 100 $. On the other hand games like PoGo which have milions of users attracts big sponsors , so they don ' t live on income from players . Also in this case if there are 10 . 000 . 000 players , each need to spend only one dollar for 10 milion $ income . Agree , that there could be features for hardcore players , but companies targeting casual players usually don ' t need to make restrictions or exclusive features accessible only to few % of players . On the other side , you just can ' t compare PC and console games wih mobile games . Mobile phones still aren ' t computers , so to complicated featuresmechanics can be to much to handle for normal mobile phones . Already many phones which don ' t meet basic requirements for PoGo are excluded , then they excluded rooted phones . That ' s probably the biggest problem , which prevent more complex battle mechanics . In future there will be changes , but still mobile games won ' t be same as PCconsole games . Also you can have PCconsole always powered , while phones have batteries which drain within hours . I ' m confident , that in future Niantic will implement more features and add more trainer levels , more events , etc .