Before we dive into the speculation, I want to be sure our readers understand one thing: this is a speculative article. We will be trying to estimate the release date for Niantic’s newest virtual pet game – Peridot.
We are basing our predictions on a few things:
- Historical release dates for Pokémon GO, Wizards Unite, Pikmin Bloom and Ingress
- The game’s theme, estimated development effort and on-the-grounds reports from Malyasia
- Our own gut feelings on when we think Perdiot release date would be
With that being said, let’s head deep down into… speculation territory!
Peridot Release Date: late Summer or early Autumn?
What we’ve seen historically, is that Niantic tries to launch games just before start of summer (June / July), or in late fall season (October / November). This has held true for most of the games that came out of the San Francisco based game studios.
For example, check the following release dates for their iconic games:
- Ingress – October 2013 (Android), July 2014 (iOS)
- Pokémon GO – July 2016
- Harry Potter: Wizards Unite – June 21, 2019
- Catan World Explorers – November 2019 (official announcement)
- Pikmin Bloom – November 2, 2021
- Transformers: Heavy Metal – June 2021 (official announcement)
Now… Peridot has been announced on April 14, 2022, with a Malaysian beta test going live on April 22, 2022 (first Android, and the iOS followed on the same day).
Niantic’s beta tests are a mixed bag at best, with some of them running for months, and some projects in recent years getting worldwide releases relatively quickly. It’s hard to estimate in what state the game currently is, at least compared to the feature set Niantic wants to build before the worldwide release.
With that being said, we think – again, this is speculation – that Niantic’s Peridot release date could be set for this Fall season. October 2022 sounds plausible to us.
Peridot Early Access Gameplay
Just a few day before this article has been written, a fellow by the name of Arek Survival, posted a video on Youtube showcasing the Early Access version of Peridot and the initial gameplay mechanics.
We’re including this video below, but be aware that the game is in its initial stages, the gameplay uses AR for the entire duration of the video and it is pretty laggy at times. We assume this was recorded on a lower end Android device.
Here are a couple of things we find interesting:
- The game is pretty much functional out of the box – you can login, play with your Dot in working AR, the interactions seem to be working properly
- Foraging works, and it looks like a lot of fun! You actually draw circles on the floor where you want your Dot to forage. We did not expect the gameplay to go in this direction, but it’s very interesting. Certainly explains what Niantic had in mind with “Dots can find food by foraging in different types of terrain” (source)
- The UI is fine, albeit a bit rough. The UI seems functional and beta-worthy, but there are some rough edges. Colour contrast and readability could be better in places, and there are some weird colour pairings, but other than that it seems quite alright.
- The in-game shop is working, and items seem to be purchasable right out of the bat.
- Habitats are also live, and the game is able to tell which Peridot has spawned at a given POI (note the “A Rare Peridot is here” message at 6:44). We assume that the POI data set used is the same as in Ingress, Pokémon GO and other Niantic games.
Overall, this looks a lot like a solid Beta, much further down the road than we expected this game to be at this point. Smells like a soft launch to us, as the gameplay loop has already been defined, the UI is functional and it is ready to be used by external testers.
We’re much further down the road than a game would be in Alpha stage.
Perdiot Release Date discussion
So with that being said, when do we think that Niantic will release Peridot globally? We think that September 2022 or October 2022 seem like a reasonable release dates.
We expect a couple of months of closed beta in Malaysia, followed by three months of rollout across key English-speaking regions (Canada, United States, Australia) and culminating in an Autumn worldwide release.