Over the weekend, Pokevision, the incredibly popular third-party tracker for Pokemon GO, was shut down. At the time, the proprietor of Pokevision, Yang Liu, stayed somewhat vague about the state of the website. Yesterday, he released a long letter that begs Niantic to end its closure of Pokevision.
The entire letter is available on Medium. Here is an excerpt:
Pokevision, at this time has grown to almost 50M unique users, and 11 million daily.
Let that sink in for a second.
Half of the player base of Pokemon Go stopped by — and they didn’t do so to “cheat.” The game was simply too unbearable to play in its current state for many (note: many, not all). The main attraction wasn’t that they got to have an advantage with Pokevision, the main attraction was that it allowed them to play Pokemon Go more. This is what everyone wants — to play Pokemon Go more.
50 million unique users! 11 million daily users! That number is enormous. At its peak, there were 25 million total players in the United States! And Yang claims the number is half of the total user base. That would explain why everyone is losing their shit over the shutdown of Pokevision.
Here is another except of Yang’s letter:
After disabling the in-game tracker and Pokevision, the ratings on iOs and Android Google Play store went from 4.0 stars to 1.0–1.5. I am only one person, I admit that my sole opinion is not important, but what about the countless players begging for the game to be restored to its former state? I may be biased in saying that Pokevision being down had an impact on the amount of negative ratings, refund requests and outcry on social media — but could it be true? Nothing has changed between the time the in-game tracker broke and Pokevision went down. Could it just be possible that the tracker — no matter if Pokevision made it, or Niantic made it, is something that players desperately NEED — not want, but NEED — in order to play the game? Could it be possible that this is the very core fundamental feature that drives most players? I understand that there are some that want to walk around and stumble on a random Pokemon — to each their own. But, 50M unique users and 11M daily and the ratings on your App (with no significant change in itself) are big indicators of this desire. Are customers always right? Especially if over half of them are looking for an outside fix just so they can enjoy something they love? People are naturally inquisitive, and in this case, they just want to play more and more, so they sought out something that helps them do so.
Early yesterday, Niantic broke its own silence and released a statement that explained why they show down the tracking services. According to them, services like Pokevision “interfer[ed] with our ability to maintain quality of service for our users and to bring Pokemon GO to users around the world.”
