Pokemon Don’t GO to Sunset Park: Niantic’s weekend blunder

Over the weekend, Pokemon Go held its GO Tour: Hoenn event in Las Vegas’s Sunset Park. This being a 3-day event and it being a busy public park, this is a very tall ask.

On Saturday, Niantic sent a tweet asking people to not go unless they paid for the event pass. They stated it was to ensure a smooth experience as many “trainers” were disconnecting during the weekend.

This wouldn’t be so appalling if they had used a private location for the event. However, they went with a Public Park in one of the world’s hottest tourist destinations to hold an event for one of the hottest mobile games.  The fact that you can simply play while walking with very little attention paid to the game, makes it perfect to do on a nature hike.\

I understand they want to ensure those paying for the special pass get to play but there are a lot of healthier ways to go about this, especially given the amount of money Pokemon Go makes. It’s also amazing for Niantic to not have the foresight to have expected a lot of people who held the pass to bring their friends or just random guests at the park to also be wanting to catch some Pokemon. Niantic’s profits for Pokemon Go alone are estimated to be around $645.29 million, and they wouldn’t take some of that to bolster server loads for this event? Especially since it’s one stop on the “tour?”

I know this new probably isn’t too surprising and that I’m not unveiling anything crazy or new, but this is a blatant line too far. Businesses should be doing better to provide a better product, not asking people to not use their product because they don’t quite have their servers together. I suppose to sum all of this up it’s company underestimates server load for really cool thing AGAIN.