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+John Hanke John,

Posted by on July 31, 2016

Your opinion about Pokémon trackers "sucking some of the fun out of it" is dead wrong. However +Niantic engaged with Pokemon Trackers to shutter them absolutely sucked 100% of the fun out of Pokemon Go for a lot of people.

Pokémon Trackers enable players to engage in self-selected, self-directed, emergent gaming behavior. This emergent behavior means that people are having fun playing +Pokémon GO in ways you never imagined…and you just crippled their fun in favor of making everyone play it "your way".

I urge you and the rest of +Niantic to embrace what the Crowd builds – then monetize it. +Niantic and +Pokémon GO could have made another $10 million dollars this week, if you'd instead embraced the work done by +Poké Vision, leveraged it, and posted an official tracker app in the store for a buck.

For me? Racing the clock to catch an unusual Pokemon turns a walk into a jog, and with the stroke of an email (Cease and Desist, maybe?) you stopped tacitly incentivizing gameplay through allowing me (and others) to self-direct my gameplay via PokeVision (I played for 3 hours yesterday, collecting Pidgeys and Rattatas and visiting Pokéstops to refill) and I've walked more in July than I have in 10 years), and you instead incentivized removing the app and going back to playing Pokemon on the DS while I'm sitting on the toilet.

I don't believe that's the intended effect.

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