Niantic Inc.

I’m iCouch.
…..
That’s it.

Anyways, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year or so, you’ve most likely heard of Pokémon GO. It’s pretty much everywhere at this point. And if you’ve heard of this game, then you’ve probably heard of Niantic, the developer of the game.

They’ve made some pretty crappy business decisions, bottom line.

Today I’ll be talking about those less-than-stellar decisions.

Something that’s majorly important in any company is communication with customers. That shouldn’t be overlooked.

Which is why it was even more suprising when Niantic, a game company that had just singlehandedly created one of the biggest mobile games in history, didn’t respond to any DM, Tweet, or Facebook post about questions regarding Pokémon GO.

This was especially frustrating as the in-game Pokémon tracker didn’t work as intended, thus making the game unplayable at times.

Niantic’s Twitter account was barren except for a tweet to Soulja Boy, a rapper I hadn’t even heard about until that point. They thought it was more important to tweet at a rapper than to actually communicate with their consumers.

We finally got a Facebook post from Niantic talking about how the in-game tracker wasn’t up to their company standards or something like that, and said they were working on it. People were still slightly miffed, but they were calmer than they were, knowing that a patch was being worked on.

Fast foward two weeks later, a new PokéGo update comes out.

It completely removes the tracker.

They removed one of the core aspects of the game.

That’s like throwing a blanket over a hole in the floor and saying it’s fixed.

People were more pissed than ever, and for good reason. It was not a good week for Niantic.

Another week or so goes by, and Niantic releases another patch, which somewhat fixes the tracker. It’s not perfect, but it’s useable at least. Some

people actually got a special beta version of an even better tracker, and it seems like they fixed the entire thing. Thank God.

Sorry for the gap in posts. It should be more consistent from here on out.

This is iCouch, signing off.