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One of the biggest gaming success stories of the past decade has been Pokémon Go. The augmented reality game has united young and old Pokémon fans in a desire to get outside and see their chosen team on the road to dominance. With Niantic selling its games division, which makes Pokémon Go, Monster Hunter Now, and Pikmin Bloom, to mobile gaming company Scopely last week, fans have been worried that their beloved game would soon be changed to fit Scopely’s business plan, but a senior product director of Pokémon Go assures us that isn’t going to happen.

“If there’s one takeaway that I would love for people to have from this conversation,” Michael Steranka, who has been working on Pokémon Go for eight years, explained in an interview when asked about the possibility of Scopely creating more intrusive ads in Pokémon Go. “It’s that definitively no, that is not happening in Pokémon Go – not now, not ever.”

He went on to emphasize that Scopely “recognizes how unique [Pokémon Go] is, and they’ve told us themselves that they would be foolish to try to change the recipe of what’s made this such a huge hit and a success…. We will not be building into our games any type of obtrusive ads or anything like that.”

That is a pretty definitive denial of what is an obvious concern for players who have invested years into Pokémon Go. Scopely seems more interested in finding out what makes Pokémon Go work and applying it to their other games rather than trying to change the winning formula Niantic found. “So of course [Scopely is] really interested in the fact that Pokémon Go is such a stable business,” Steranka said. “But almost more than that, they’ve been really interested to try to learn from us and see what they can take from how we build Pokémon Go and apply that to potentially other games in their portfolio and future games to come as well.”

Of course, this is just one person speaking to calm fans as they voice their (valid) concerns about a game that has brought them so much joy for almost a decade, but it is a pretty direct statement that, at least for the foreseeable future, Pokémon Go won’t be shoving ads in your face or restricting how long you can play each day unless you pay a premium fee.

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