BY KEVIN SAWYER – Well, it seems that the Niantic company, creator of the world wide phenomenon, Pokemon Go, may have finally destroyed the game once and for all. How can a company break a game that has such tremendous financial potential, you say? Well, here is how they may have done it.
The game seems to be a simple construct by Niantic in partnership with the Pokemon Company. Players by the many millions engage a GPS like tracking system along with an augmented reality of the world around them and they move along following the footprints in the hope of catching one of the many elusive pokemon. OK, so far so good.
To say that the game has been a gigantic success for its creators would be a severe understatement. With nearly 100 million people playing the game all over the world, with millions jumping on board everyday, it would seem impossible that anyone could destroy this proverbial golden goose that is laying golden eggs for the company all over the planet.
However, like the late night infomercials say: but wait, there’s more…
About a month ago, when the game made its debut, there was a quite simple system for how players could track down their elusive pokemon. It was a simple footprint system. As a player hunted a pokemon, footprints would appear letting the player know if they were close or not. One footprint means that the player is close and three means they are way off. As a player moved around, the number of footprints displayed would alert the player to the proximity of a pokemon.
Sure, hardly the greatest game system ever invented but players figured it out and continued to enjoy themselves and the game. Until Niantic screwed things up for itself and the millions of Go players. Recently, there has been a phenomenon referred to as the “3 footprint bug” which seems like it will destroy the game. Now, for some inexplicable reason, there are three footprints denoted for every pokemon and location so that it has become almost impossible to play the game.
Rumor has it that Niantic wanted to slow things down because their servers are so overworked. So, instead of adding more servers to handle the load, like most regular and successful companies would do, Niantic creates this bug to slow things down instead. So, as expected, entrepreneurs came to the rescue and suddenly Pokevision appeared on the scene allowing players to track their pokemon without the use of the annoying footprints.
Pokevision could tell players exactly where to hunt for the pokemon as well as display how much time they had to do so before the pokemon despawned. A brilliant innovation just may have saved one of the most popular games of all time.
But wait, there’s more…
The CEO of Niantic, John Hanke gave an interiew with Forbes magazine late last week to, among other things, express his great displeasure with the existence of Pokevision. He didn’t recognize the problem with the footprint bug or explain how Niantic was going to fix it. So, pokemon players had little choice but to stay with Pokevision. Three days after Hanke’s interview with Forbes, however, guess what?
Pokevision was shut down.
So now players have no way at all of tracking down the pokemon. Are they just to wander around until maybe they find one? What kind of a game is that? Niantic has not announced any sort of time frame for fixing the three footprint tracking problem so many players have simply stopped playing. There just doesn’t seem any point any more. No legitimate business would ever alienate customers in such a way as to potentially destroy their very business. Hopefully, soon, we will be able to say,
But wait, there’s more…
PHOTO CREDITS: Reuters / The Associated Press / Business Insider