[Coda]

I doubt that manpower is the issue. Niantic is a Google spinoff, and having worked for Google (in fact, in the same building as Niantic for a while) I'm reasonably certain that it's run like a Google team. 20-30 people is actually quite a lot when you consider that they only have two projects and they don't have to have employees to handle things like marketing (Nintendo does that for Go and they don't advertise Ingress except for the occasional event) or system administration (they use Google App Engine so the ugly parts are taken care of for them).

As a developer, if I got to work with 30 people on a single team I'd be feeling a little overwhelmed by there being TOO many people involved. There's a book called "The Mythical Man-Month" that talks about how throwing more developers at a late project only makes it later -- software development can only be split up so far before you start losing efficiency by having to coordinate too many potentially-conflicting sources of input.

To be completely honest, Pokemon Go is actually a RIDICULOUSLY simple game, code-wise. Since release, no one has ever seen a bug in the actual core mechanics. The issues have all been with the interface or the network, with two known exceptions (the rangefinder "bug" that was actually intentionally put in there to try to reduce some of the server load, and the bug that sometimes gets expiration times backwards leaving despawned Pokemon visible in the radar). 5-10 people on the game client, if you've got a couple iOS-specific specialists and a couple Android-specific specialists, and 4-6 people on the server intuitively feels like about the right level of stuff now that the game is functionally complete.

They even have the advantage that they don't even need artists; I imagine The Pokemon Company gave them everything they needed in advance.