A new gym update is coming to Pokemon Go. (Niantic)
UPDATE: The Pokemon Go gym update has now been released. It is making its way to Android and iOS devices and should reach all players within 24 to 48 hours. Once everyone has the new update, gyms will come back online, and fans will have a chance to sink their teeth into the new system.
A major update is coming to Pokemon Go, with Niantic Labs planning to make some dramatic alterations to the gym system. For this reason, gyms are currently under construction. So when is the gym update going to come out?
Well, Niantic has not provided any official release date, but comments they have made recently suggest we could see the gym update by the end of this week. First of all, there’s a comment from a Niantic employee on Reddit on Monday. A Reddit user asked this employee if fans should expect the update in a matter of days or a matter of weeks. The employee wrote, “I cannot share an exact timeline for you yet. Two things to keep in mind, except it to take days (not hours) and expect the rollout to be gradual.” This Niantic employee was given the option of “days” or “weeks” here, and they said “days,” while specifying that the rollout of the update won’t happen all at once.
Another piece of evidence comes from Niantic’s June 19th press release, in which they say that the Raid Battle feature will be rolled out slowly over the next few weeks. But they say that the gym update will come before the Raid Battle feature, suggesting it’s more of an immediate thing and not a “next few weeks” thing. Niantic also said that the gyms would be “temporarily disabled,” previously saying they’d be disabled for “a short period of time.” Gyms will only be disabled until the update is released, and so Niantic is therefore also saying that the update will be out in a short period of time.
Plus, when they originally mentioned the idea of disabling gyms, Niantic suggested the gyms wouldn’t be down for long. They announced the Solstice Event for June 13th and then said that the gym update would be released “[s]oon thereafter.” Presumably, they meant that the gym update would come out soon after the Solstice Event concludes, and that event ends on June 20th.
It’s also reasonable to expect the update to come this week because Niantic was already due for one in the coming days, at least if they were to stick with the biweekly schedule. Pokemon Go updates have traditionally been released every two weeks, although Niantic has missed that deadline over the past few months. Still, the last update came out two weeks ago now, meaning players were expecting an update to possibly come this week even before Niantic made this major gym announcement.
Here’s a look at the Pokemon Go update release calendar since September 2016; you’ll notice that since April, Niantic has been on a schedule of monthly updates, but that might just be because they were busy working on this gym overhaul:
- Tuesday, June 6th
- Tuesday, May 9th
- Thursday, April 6th
- Wednesday, March 29th
- Tuesday, March 21st
- Friday, February 24th
- Thursday, February 16th
- Saturday, January 28th
- Tuesday, January 17th
- Thursday, December 22nd
- Monday, December 19th
- Wednesday, December 7th
- Friday, November 18th
- Sunday, November 6th
- Wednesday, October 26th
- Sunday, October 23rd
- Monday, October 10th
- Monday, September 26th
- Friday, September 23rd
With this in mind, it seems that the absolute worst case scenario for the gym update’s release would be around July 5th. That would mark a month since the previous update, and it would also come out right around the time of the game’s first anniversary, which is on July 6th. The best case scenario would be the update coming out in the next 24 to 48 hours or so, as it’s already been two weeks since the previous update, and this would mark Niantic’s return to the biweekly update schedule.
It should be noted that the Raid Battles feature is not expected to be a part of this gym update. Instead, the forthcoming update will include the new “motivation system,” in which Pokemon have a motivation bar that drains the longer that they are stationed in gyms. Plus, new restrictions will be put in place, such as a requirement that no more than one type of the same species of Pokemon can be in a gym at once. Niantic says that the raid feature will come out separately from the gym update, first being released in a beta and then being rolled out to the average player. Again, we don’t have any set timetable on that, but based on the way they’ve described it, it sounds like we shouldn’t expect to get our hands on the raid system until late July.
