“Pokemon GO” has been a huge success, and there’s no denying that.
But as I wrote a few weeks back, that success came in spite of itself. “Pokemon GO” feels incomplete, and the way its creators at Niantic Labs have been as quiet as they possibly can be since it launched in early July indicates they weren’t prepared for any of this. Nor is it likely that they even know where they want to take it.
That’s led to a ton of fan frustration, as this fire that burned so bright and so hot appears to be quickly fading. That frustration reached its crescendo over the weekend when the latest update for “Pokemon GO” hit app stores.
Since that update came down, fans have been riled up about two things. The first is the removal of the footprints indicator that tells players approximately how far away specific types of Pokemon are. The footprints feature didn’t work anyway — it always just said every Pokemon was at the maximum distance while still being inside the detectable range.
So they didn’t fix it. Instead, it was just patched out without saying why. Are the footprints gone forever? Is this a temporary thing while they do a fix? We don’t know, because they won’t talk about it.
The second — and bigger — thing is that since that update, third-party Pokemon trackers like Pokevision have gone offline. These services were created to fill in the feature gap left by the footprints bug by showing on a map where specific Pokemon would be and for how long. With the footsteps indicator broken, Pokevision was pretty much the only tool players had to hunt specific Pokemon instead of just stumbling upon them at random.
So right now, players are “blind.” And this couldn’t have happened at a worse time — players have had their fill of running around town catching random stuff. They need purpose but, without tracking, it’s basically impossible to have one. The whales — hardcore players who spend the most money on the game — need a reason to keep going with it. Now a lot of them feel like they don’t.
And that’s Niantic’s and The Pokemon Company’s fault. The update didn’t accidentally remove Pokevision’s ability to track Pokemon within the game. Niantic took action.
The company’s CEO, John Hanke, told Forbes last week that he was “not a fan” of those trackers. “They might find in the future that those things may not work. People are only hurting themselves because it takes some fun out of the game. People are hacking around trying to take data out of our system and that’s against our terms of service.”
Meanwhile, the folks behind Pokevision are discussing their tracker’s current non-functionality as an intentional thing. They turned it off because Niantic told them to.
Hey guys. We wish we had some news for you
At this moment, we are respecting Niantic and Nintendo's wishes.
Will keep you guys posted
<3
— Yang (@PokeVisionGo) July 31, 2016
Other tracker developers have likewise discussed cease and desist letters they received from The Pokemon Company. The trackers are gone because the powers behind “Pokemon GO” wanted them gone.
And, yes, as Hanke said, the siphoning of location data from the app is certainly a “terms of service” issue, and The Pokemon Company is well within its rights to enforce those rules.
The idea that “Pokemon GO” will somehow be more fun without trackers, though, is ludicrous. Playing “Pokemon GO” with a tracker is already a lot of work — without a tracker, that amount of work grows exponentially. Wandering aimlessly with your fingers crossed in hopes you’ll find the Pokemon you’re looking for isn’t fun. It’s just tiring. And if you don’t live in a big city that’s dense with Pokemon, it’s straight up futile.
What Hanke — and by extension The Pokemon Company — seemingly fails to grasp about the trackers is they only exist because the footprints in “Pokemon GO” itself didn’t work. If the footprints worked, most players probably wouldn’t feel as though the trackers are so urgently necessary.
But here we are with no footprints and no trackers. Players are requesting refunds on money spent in “Pokemon GO” en masse, and Reddit and social media are alight with fans swearing off the game.
There was never any question that the popularity of “Pokemon GO” would fade pretty quickly, because it requires too much of a time investment for casual players to keep at it for long. The real question, instead, was whether it would be able to sustain a substantial core base of users over a long period.
The removal of the trackers, with nothing in the app itself to fill their void, then, is pretty much the opposite of stacking the deck in your favor.