Mike Wuerthele
Despite a possible weekend assault by hackers, Pokémon Go is now available in 35 countries, with a Japanese launch on hold pending an expansion of much-needed server capacity.
Developer Niantic's official Twitter account for Pokémon Go announced the availability in Canada on Monday morning. European countries added over the weekend are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Greenland, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, and Switzerland.
A rollout in the property's home of Japan has yet to happen. Speaking to Forbes, Niantic CEO John Hanke said that "at present, the server capacity in Japan is not powerful enough." Hanke promised a launch in Japan later in July, and 200 countries in total within a couple of months.
Outage tracking data aggregator Downdetector.com continues to report mass server outages, aggravated by the wide weekend launches, across most of Europe . The North American outages have abated somewhat even with a still growing user base, and remain focused in the core of major metropolitan areas with suburbs and smaller towns less profoundly affected.
On top of the weekend expansions, a hacker group declared responsibility for severe weekend server access problems. Niantic and Google have not confirmed the claims, saying only that the problems during the time of the alleged assault have been rectified. The same group has claimed on Twitter that they will continue attacking the servers for the game on August 1.
Google, Nintendo, Niantic, and intellectual property manager The Pokémon Company are all deeply involved in the development of Pokémon Go. Apple and Google are collecting the customary 30 percent from in-app purchases, and as a result make more money off the game than Nintendo does directly. Nintendo's stock price has surged 50 percent since the title's release.
Pokémon Go is available from the iOS App Store, requires iOS 8 or above, and occupies 193MB of storage space.
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10 Comments
Shit, who cares. This is post number 10 or 11 about Pokemon Go and after the first few, no one replies because they don't care, especially about where it has been released next.
Every day without fail, 1 or 2 Pokemon posts. Give it a rest.
Stop giving them free advertisements. This exposure is getting ridiculous.
Apple makes 30% revenue, could be a few billion dollars in extra earnings this year for Apple.
It's worth tracking because of the CATEGORY, not the game.
The long-term significance is that this game = the 1st significant proof-point for the monetization of AR. That could have large implications across the app industry -- not just games -- as other companies think about how AR can benefit them. In that context, tracking the rollout of the 1st successful AR deployment could be instructive.