Niantic Reveals Why it Closed Pokémon Go Map Services

Following the furore caused by its last update for Pokémon Go, which removed the faulty three-step feature for finding nearby Pokémon and disabled tracking features used by third-party map services, Niantic Labs has been playing damage control. First, the developer apologised for the changes, assuring players – many of whom had threatened to stop playing – that the three-step tracker should return after the necessary refinements. Now, Niantic has revealed in detail why it was forced to prohibit access to its tracking features.

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

Hanke revealed that blocking third-party data scrapers – and, thus, freeing up its server resources – was necessary to facilitate the game’s roll-out into South America. “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,” he wrote.

“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,” he added. “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.”

Niantic will continue to fight attempts to break its scraper blocks in order to protect the integrity of the game, according to Hanke. While the three-step feature may return in future, it seems that third-party map support is gone forever.