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'Pokémon GO' And The Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Decision To Shut Down Third-Party Maps

This article is more than 7 years old.

For a little while, it appeared that Pokémon GO developer Niantic Labs had gotten lucky. The "nearby" tracking feature in the game broke just a few days after launch, leaving a pretty gaping hole in moment-to-moment gameplay and a major headache for the developer. Enter sites and apps like Pokévision and other third-party mapping services that broke open the game's API and gave players maps to all the Pokémon in their area. It wasn't perfect, but it filled a vital niche while Niantic worked to fix the bug in their game and gave players something to do besides wandering around, hoping to stumble on Pokémon. As a nice side effect, it showed the early moments of a developing, active fanbase -- yes, these maps violated the game's terms of service, but there was little malicious about them. Niantic, however, decided it would be better to render this gift horse for glue and shut down Pokévision and all other similar sites last night. I love this game and want it succeed, but the developer is just shooting itself in the foot.

Fans are upset, as are the people that ran these websites. As well they should be: it would have been a big, if forgivable, bug if there remained no way to track specific Pokémon in the game, but it becomes a whole lot less forgivable when the developer goes out of its way to actively prevent the community from helping. It seems that Niantic thought there was something essentially "wrong" about playing Pokémon GO with an app like Pokévision, and wanted to keep tighter control over the way in which people were experiencing the game. This is a bad place to start.

Any game that functions as a service needs to keep its players on its side. And that means you need to make a basic assumption: anything that players do with the game, even if it's something you didn't expect them to do-- a weird exploit, a tool like Pokévision or anything else-- is good. It shows commitment, it shows a developing playerbase and a community that's going to start shaping your game in new and exciting ways.  Every time a casual player decided to go back to the store and see if they could find some companion apps to help play the game, that's a moment at which a player is increasing their involvement. That's what you want, after all.

You still need to combat out and out cheating (in this case, GPS spoofing and bots), and exploits will need to be patched. You've just got to remember that the players are on your team. You've got to let them take the reins a little bit, and you've got to show them the respect inherent in communicating why you made the decisions you made.  Nobody wants to lose control over their baby, but that's what happens when you let it out into the world. People aren't playing your game wrong, they're figuring out new ways to play.

There is a world in which this made sense: if this was a decision made purely based on server capacity and Niantic was trying to shore up stability by cutting out third parties, the developer would have been justified. I'd still say Niantic should have waited until it fixed its own bugs, and it definitely would need to communicate that that's why this was happening. Instead, it's decided to stay silent.

Now, Niantic just has a mess. People are irritated and the game lost functionality: it's really a lose-lose that could have been totally avoided by doing nothing. Here's some advice cribbed from Destiny developer Bungie: go to the Pokémon GO subreddit, find either the moderator or one of the most active members, and hire them as a community manager. You need one. Hire the Pokevision and Silph Road developers while you're at it.