Everyone who plays Pokémon GO has probably had a similar experience. You're walking around, hunting for monsters, and you feel the familiar buzz of a nearby Pokémon from your phone. You tap the Pidgey, or whatever, and go to catch it. It shows up on your screen, you nail it with a Pokeball, and the game zooms into the little thing struggling inside. A few moments later, the game is frozen and you have to restart. We're only a week in, but crashes and other glitches are still a big part of the Pokémon GO experience.
We'll start with the good side of things: Pokémon GO is vastly improved since it launched a week ago. We've had one update so far, and the servers actually allow you to play, which is positive. I've been able to sign into the game on around 90% of my tries, which is a lot better than 0. 90%, however, is not 100%. We still find ourselves with a bunch of technical problems, which is troubling given the fact that Niantic seems to be moving forward with the European launch. The Pokémon-catching crash is the most regular one for me, but there are plenty of others as well. The game still sticks on the warning/loading screen sometimes, tapping on a Pokemon still crashes the game sometimes, as does using a Pokestop. Transfers don't always work, and sometimes things just freeze up at random moments, or the game fails to populate my map.
New players, also, report having trouble creating accounts and getting into the game.
These are the growing pains of any new online game, exacerbated by Pokémon GO's completely unprecedented success. Preparing for 21m downloads is just difficult to do, and there were bound to be glitches in these early days. But I do worry, some, about how this could impact a game that's catering to such a wide audience. There is bound to be a sizable dropoff in daily active users after the initial excitement subsides, just by the natural forces of people signing up to check out a phenomenon they weren't really the ideal customer for anyway. But that could easily be exacerbated by the technical issues, as well as the shortcomings in the battle system. Plenty of mobile games launch missing key features or waiting to fix technical problems, but none of them explode in the way Pokémon GO has. We're in uncharted territory here.
