Pokemon Go update: Niantic blames closure of tracking apps on global release

The company wouldn’t have been able to cope with the huge demand that is being put on its servers otherwise, according to CEO John Hanke

People join the Hong Kong's first Pokemon Go tram party organized by 'Sam the Local', on July 30, 2016 in Hong Kong (Lam Yik Fei/Getty Images)

The makers of Pokemon Go had to ruin the game so that more people could play it, they have claimed.

Last week, developers Niantic rolled out an update that killed the tool that lets people track Pokemon inside the game, as well as cutting off access to the third-party tools that aim to make it easier for people to find them. Together, the changes provoked ire, leading many people to complain that they wanted refunds for the money they spent in the game, and threatened to quit altogether.

But now Niantic has tried to explain why it had to shut off those third-party apps, claiming that it couldn’t have continued the international rollout of the game without having done so. Many countries still can’t legitimately download the game, because its rollout is being staggered to make sure that its servers can take the load.

“Running a product like Pokémon GO at scale is challenging,” wrote Niantic CEO John Hanke in a blog post apparently looking to calm down players’ anger. Those challenges have been amplified by third parties attempting to access our servers in various ways outside of the game itself.”

The company said that sites like Pokevision – which scrape the game to find out where Pokemon are hiding out – looked innocuous but actually “hurt our ability to deliver the game to new and existing players.

Mr Hanke said, for instance, that it wouldn’t have been able to complete the rollout to Brazil and the rest of Latin America if it hadn’t switched off the tools.

“We were very excited to finally be able to take this step,” he wrote. “We were delayed in doing that due to aggressive efforts by third parties to access our servers outside of the Pokémon GO game client and our terms of service.”

As well as the extra load on its servers, Mr Hanke said that the time Niantic spends shutting down people who are scraping data is time that it can’t spend adding new features.

“It’s worth noting that some of the tools used to access servers to scrape data have also served as platforms for bots and cheating which negatively impact all Trainers. There is a range of motives here from blatant commercial ventures to enthusiastic fans but the negative impact on game resources is the same.”

Mr Hanke did promise however that Niantic would fix the Nearby feature that allowed people to track where Pokemon were. That has been broken since not long after the game launched, and was the reason that many users had turned to third-party apps like Pokevision in the first place.