Earlier this week, we reported that Niantic had shut down Pokevision as well as a number of other smaller Pokemon tracking services. Niantic had claimed that these services used their servers to provide their users with information which was against Terms of Usage.
One of the more interesting bits of information is the fact that the service had grown to almost 50 million unique users and 11 million daily users. This is an incredible amount of people for a brand new service.
We’ve highlighted some of the more powerful parts of the letter below, but we’d recommend giving it a read HERE.
I write this not as one of the creators of Pokevision nor as player who has gone through the past few turbulent days in Pokemon Go; instead, I write this as a fan of Pokemon ever since I was 8 years old.
My family and I moved to the U.S. in 1998, when I was in the first grade. I didn’t know much back then, and even less about popular culture. When my friends introduced their Gameboys and Pokemon Red/Blue to me, I couldn’t help but feel envious. I begged and begged my parents to buy me a Gameboy and Pokemon Yellow. I remember that when I finally convinced them to buy me a Gameboy for $70, they also found out that they had to buy the actual game too for $30. This was foreign to them, and I got yelled at a little. $100 was a lot back then, I believe it was almost 10% of our family’s income at the time. While this may seem irrelevant, even today, this amount of money is still not insignificant to many families in the US, not to mention the rest of the world.
…..
You’ve simply captured all of our hearts with Pokemon Go, Niantic.
But then, you broke it all too quickly.
When the game broke every few hours or so and wasted our lucky eggs, we stood patiently, excusing the huge growth and thus, strain on servers, as the cause. We were happy to wait it out with our fellow trainers knowing that it’s worth waiting for. No one got mad.
When the in-game tracking “broke,” we all stood idly by, patiently, waiting for the game to update and fix.
Along came Pokevision. We made Pokevision not to “cheat.” We made it so that we can have a temporary relief to the in-game tracker that we were told was broken. John, at SDCC, you said that you guys were working on “fixing the in-game tracker.” This made everyone believe that this was coming sometime soon. We saw Pokevision as a stop gap to this?—?and we had every intention in closing it down the minute that Pokemon Go’s own tracker restored functionality.
As we waited more than 2 and a half weeks, the tracker was still not fixed. We noticed more and more of our friends leave the game; the only way I?—?and I know experiences vary here?—?could convince them to play was show them Pokevision, and say that “Hey, here’s a temporary remedy to the tracking issue?—?we’re still optimistic that Pokemon Go’s tracker will be fixed soon!”
