Niantic seems to have trouble telling if a franchise is a good fit for the tech they have and the gameplay it enables. Marvel, Transformers, HP, and Basketball don’t lend themselves well to the grindy collection and exploration mechanics.
We’ll see how well Monster Hunter holds up, gameplay wise. It at least has a repeatable thing that sorta makes sense thematically (like fighting several Rathalos to gather parts) as opposed to having 5 clones of LeBron James or getting… stickers of stuff that you might recognize.
I think a lot of stuff could fit their tech, if they were willing to go the extra mile and develop standard game features as well. Pokemon Go could be so much more if they implemented more RPG stuff. Ingress might have reached its limit, I dunno… But everything they’ve produced since those has been incredibly bare-bones and boring. And they all sounded like they had potential.
They want to do the absolute minimum amount of work to support their main mechanic, and nothing else… And it’s killing them.
Pikmin was a pretty decent fit, but they dropped the seemingly easiest ball on gameplay! Niantic already have a flinging-objects mechanic, and Pikmin has a central “throwing Pikmin on the enemy” mechanic. They should’ve had some kinda action mechanic where you chuck your pikmin at the target!
