Nintendo Cracking Down On ‘Pirated’ Pokemon GO Apps

So far by our count, Pokemon GO is officially available in 7 countries – Australia, New Zealand, the US, the UK, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. This means that there are plenty of gamers around the world itching to get their hands on the game, some of whom are probably resorting to downloading the app’s APK as a way of getting it unofficially.

Unfortunately this is something that Nintendo isn’t too thrilled about and a report from TorrentFreak has revealed that Nintendo is cracking down on these “pirated” apps. We’re not sure how successful they will be since once an app has been pirated and spread across the internet, taking one down means another few copies will pop up somewhere else.

In fact Similarweb claims that 6.8% of all Android devices in Canada and the Netherlands have the game installed, and these are countries the app isn’t officially available in yet. Torrent websites like The Pirate Bay list dozens of copies of the APK, although we’re not sure if this would be a smart move since we’re sure that there are some opportunistic hackers who might try to hide a piece of malware in the APKs.

Obviously it would be to Nintendo’s benefit if they could release the game as soon as possible, but to be fair, server issues were what caused the rollout to be halted and we suppose we’d much rather wait than play a game that may or may not work due to the server running into problems thanks to the influx of players.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Gaming
Tags: Android, Apps, Nintendo, Pokémon GO