If you’ve caught the Pokemon Go bug then you’ll be familiar with the patchy service, constant app crashes and all around general unreliability of the App in general. Pokemon Go has to be the most successful launch of a crap end user experience in history, which in itself is either a credit to the game mechanic or the flat out popularity of Pokemon, or both.
Well you can say goodbye to playing today, if the rumours are true that Japan will be going live Today Wednesday 20 July then regardless of any comments to the contrary from Niantic I think it’s safe to assume that releasing Pokemon Go into what is most likely it’s most popular target market will send the already scratchy service into a complete nose dive. Time will tell, but seeing as it’s already not working for us right now I am not hopeful, and with Japan just an hour behind us we won’t have long to wait.
To go along with the Japanese release we are hearing that McDonalds will be releasing the first Sponsored Gyms to all 3000 store locations across Japan. By placing gyms in every single McDonalds location across Japan Niantic is hoping to supplement the millions of dollars they are already making each day and McDonals are hoping to drive more customers to their stores.
It will be interesting to see if the health benefits of all the walking that Pokemon Go is inspiring will be overridden by all the increased McDonalds that will undoubtedly be getting eaten as a result of the gyms being present in their stores. If Niantic wants to be truly evil they should tie access to the Gym to the in-store WiFi ensuring customers must be very very close to get access.
All score aside if they sponsored locations works we should expect to see them roll out internationally as more markets come online week by week.
Are you playing Pokemon? Can you get online today? Let us know below.
