Pokemon locator sites “hurt” Pokemon GO, says Niantic CEO

Pokemon GO players have not been shy when it comes to talking about their disapproval of Niantic's move to remove the 3-step feature and the Pokemon locator sites. Niantic's forums and social accounts have been flooded by fans telling them how much they want the feature back, which has lead to CEO John Hanke officially releasing a statement on why they removed the third-party locator sites, like PokeVision.

According to Hanke, those sites consumed a ton of the server resources for Pokemon GO and was the reason why the game was getting a delayed release in some countries. Taking to the official Pokemon GO site, Hanke explained the removal:

"As some of you may have noticed we recently rolled out Pokémon GO to Latin America including Brazil. We were very excited to finally be able to take this step. We were delayed in doing that due to aggressive efforts by third parties to access our servers outside of the Pokémon GO game client and our terms of service. We blocked some more of those attempts yesterday.

"Since there has been some public discussion about this, 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 below shows the drop in server resources consumed when we blocked scrapers. Freeing those resources allowed us to proceed with the Latin America launch."

"It’s worth noting that some of the tools used to access servers to scrape data have also served as platforms for bots and cheating which negatively impact all Trainers. There is a range of motives here from blatant commercial ventures to enthusiastic fans but the negative impact on game resources is the same.'

You can read the post in full here.