[gambiting]

Uhmmm I guess the downvotes are coming because no one believes that Niantic couldn't predict that the first mobile game(if we forget Pokemon Shuffle for a second) in one of the biggest franchises in the world would be this popular, and I feel like it's quite a popular opinion that the app was released at least 6 months too early, it's poorly optimized and full of bugs. Not to mention that Niantic cannot handle PR, they don't even have a Pokemon GO-dedicated rep yet, they are looking for one. Personally I know several people who played this game every day after it came out, now this number fell down to zero, after a while there isn't much to do and the recent updates made the game worse. I have stopped playing after few days because every other catch the app would freeze and I would have to restart the whole thing. Plus the fact that it's obliterating the battery just by being open is unacceptable - obviously it's just a personal opinion so take it as you will.

[yomly]

Fine - that's fair enough, there have been some questionable actions (or lack of actions) especially from the PR front, but these aren't things the average dev can influence and the lack of a PR head is absolutely nothing the devs can do anything about.

That said, however, the devs would still be affected by the feedback, they are almost certainly are working crazy stressful hours and the general backlash towards them is directed towards engineering.

My point being that we have no idea what it's like whatsoever inside Niantic, but you can be pretty sure their employees are working frantically right now, and the flak directed in their general direction is pretty unwarranted considering they've brought out a free video game that loads of people are enjoying.

The product might well have been released 6 months early, but isn't a more positive viewpoint that we should be grateful for having a version of Pokemon Go available early? 1 month ago, we didn't have pokemon go and our lives were essentially the same. Nothing is forcing us to play this game, it's bad, don't play it. If you have a problem with the management of the product then explicitly call out the management team but let's not forget that humans built and are building this product and are mostly following the instructions of their corporate overlords and take a moment to thank them for their hard work.

[xorcist]

It's also unfortunate that the game handles failures so badly. It hangs and behaves strangely in a number of ways instead of showing an error message.

[TeMPOraL]

Yup. For instance, the whole catching interaction part behaves as if the code was full of shitty hacks that couple UI and local game state with successful and timely API responses. The kind of hangs you get with e.g. your Pokéball stuck mid-air because of API response problem seems like a type of bug you'd actually have to go out of your way to make in any kind of sane design.