Niantic Refunding Gamers After Failed Pokemon GO Festival

As you might have heard, Niantic has finally introduced legendary Pokemon to Pokemon GO. This comes after a year of the game being in existence, and to celebrate the launch the company organized a massive event in Chicago to kick things off, but unfortunately it seems that things didn’t exactly go the way they imagined.

So much so that Niantic has decided that they will refund gamers the cost of their tickets as well as give them $100 in Poke Coins to help make up for it. According to the statement issued by the company, “Today at Pokémon GO Fest in Chicago, technical issues created problems for a large number of players attending the event. From everyone at Niantic, we apologize to all of the Trainers who came out to Pokémon GO Fest today. Although we were able to solve many of the technical issues, we were not able to offer every attendee a great experience.”

Basically it seemed that maybe Niantic had underestimated just how many players would turn up, and due to the overwhelming number of players, it affected the servers which prevented players from interacting with the game properly. Players were understandably frustrated and chanted “We can’t play!” when Niantic’s John Hanke came on stage.

In all fairness Pokemon GO is pretty much the first of its kind which makes it hard to anticipate how gamers might react. In any case hopefully this is a lesson that Niantic can learn from and that for future events they will be better prepared to them.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Gaming
Tags: Apps, niantic, Pokémon GO