Niantic Labs published a blog post explaining its decision to shut down Pokemon Go tracking sites. Niantic explained on the official Pokemon Go website that blocking the third parties who were accessing their servers freed up a lot of resources. Some of these resources actually helped push forward with the recent launch of the game Latin America.
According to Niantic’s post, We wanted to shed some more light on why we did this and why these seemingly innocuous sites and apps actually hurt our ability to deliver the game to new and existing players.”
The chart above was also shared in the post and displays the drop in server resources consumed after the third-party “scrapers” were blocked.
Niantic also explained that developers lost precious time when dealing with this issue. Time that could have been spent building new features for the game.
The post acknowledges other issues, including cheating and attempts to hack the system, but states that the developer “will continue to take steps to maintain the stability and integrity of the game… We look forward to getting the game on stable footing so we can begin to work on new features.” Niantic has stated.