Pokemon Go creators Niantic Labs have taken down PokeVision.com, the third-party site dedicated to helping players of the mobile game find rare Pokemon, in a controversial move that is being dubbed the beginning of the end for the app.
PokeVision provided a service that wasn’t available in the base game, with Pokemon Go‘s own tracker being woefully inadequate when it came to helping players catch the game’s creatures. After multiple server failures around the time of the game’s launch, Niantic eventually scaled back its tracker in order to provide an even more vague of where nearby Pokemon were located, thus rendering it almost entirely useless. As such, the site PokeVision.com stepped up to fill the void of a reliable Pokemon tracker, accessing players’ geo-locations in order to provide them with a far more accurate map of the location of rare Pokemon.
Though many believed that using PokeVision was tantamount to cheating, considering that Niantic had failed to provide their own functioning tracker, it became the only way to successfully hunt down Pokemon without resorting to guesswork. However, the site’s creators have now claimed that Niantic has shut them down, posting the following tweet on its official Twitter page:
Hey guys. We wish we had some news for you
At this moment, we are respecting Niantic and Nintendo’s wishes.
Will keep you guys posted
<3
— Pokevision (@PokeVisionGo) July 31, 2016
PokeVision’s co-creator Yang C. Liu posted his own tweet following the news, writing: “You don’t invent Marco Polo, get 80M players to join, then remove the Polo part and expect people to keep playing.”
Visiting PokeVision.com now brings up the message “our services are currently unavailable,” urging visitors to follow the site’s dedicated Twitter page for updates. Though many felt it was an inevitability that Niantic would eventually seek to shut down third party apps that made Pokemon hunting easier, that the company did so before fixing its own tracker will likely prove to be detrimental to Pokemon Go, given how it transforms it into a game of complete chance. If Niantic were committed to shutting down PokeVision, they should have at least waited until they got Pokemon Go’s own tracker up and working once again.
