Niantic gives perfectly reasonable reason why it shut down third-party Pokemon GO apps

Pokemon GO has recently come under fire after developer Niantic shut off access to third-party applications such as map tools which helped players locate nearby Pokemon.

Fans weren’t happy, many requesting refunds on their in-app purchases. However, it turns out Niantic made the decision to block third-party tools to enable the roll out of the game in additional territories. The studio explains in a new blog post that these third-party apps were hammering the game’s servers with requests, as such making server management very difficult.

“Running a product like Pokémon GO at scale is challenging. Those challenges have been amplified by third parties attempting to access our servers in various ways outside of the game itself,” reads the blog.

“As some of you may have noticed we recently rolled out Pokémon GO to Latin America including Brazil. We were very excited to finally be able to take this step. 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. We blocked some more of those attempts yesterday. Since there has been some public discussion about this, we wanted to shed some more light on why we did this and why these seemingly innocuous sites and apps actually hurt our ability to deliver the game to new and existing players. The chart below shows the drop in server resources consumed when we blocked scrapers. Freeing those resources allowed us to proceed with the Latin America launch.”

The blog continues: “In addition to hampering our ability to bring Pokémon GO to new markets, dealing with this issue also has opportunity cost. Developers have to spend time controlling this problem vs. building 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.

“Of course, there are also outright hackers out there attempting to break into systems, hijack social media accounts, and even bring down the service. Some of them have posted publicly about their attempts.

“We don’t expect these attempts to stop. But we do want you to understand why we have taken the steps we have and why we will continue to take steps to maintain the stability and integrity of the game.”

This all seems perfectly reasonable as both a business and user-led decision, which leads to more players able to access Pokemon GO with less server downtime.

The blog concludes: “We value feedback from our community. We have heard feedback about the Nearby feature in the game and are actively working on it.”

However, fans should only expect to see new features once the game is “on stable footing”.

Source: Pokemon GO Blog