Pokémon GO Waves Goodbye to Monster-Finding Services

On Saturday, Pokémon GO had its popular service, Pokévision.com display text that it was “currently unavailable.” Then, Pokévision cofounder Yangcheng Liu said “it possibly could be” down indefinitely. Liu did not state whether or not Pokémon GO would take legal action against him or his site. Pokévision is a Pokémon-locating service.

That’s not all. Another Pokémon-locating service, PokeHound.com recently updated their website with this message, “We tried our best 🙁 – Check Twitter for updates.” In addition, the company closed its Twitter account this weekend. This took place right after they loaded a screenshot of an alleged email from Niantic with its terms of service. Pokémon is currently the most popular game app of all time. Niantic seems to now be going after services that help gamers catch them all.

The premise of Pokémon Go is to go out and try to catch the virtual monsters that appear on mobile devices. The in-game feature, that helped players find the creatures, broke. As a result, new apps and sites were created telling users which Pokémon would show up at a certain location and for how long. In five days, Pokévision gained 27 million unique visitors. Moreover, it was a free service.

In an update sent to users on Saturday, Niantic discontinued that feature. The company then started blocking third-party access to its servers. Pokévision and other Pokémon-locating services retrieve data from Pokémon Go servers. Although, this is a violation of Niantic’s terms of service. It seems more changes may be on the horizon.

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