Now We Know Why The ‘Pokémon Go’ Launch Sucked So Much

  Remember when Grand Theft Auto Online hit? It arrived a month or so after Grand Theft Auto V, and… well, it was a shitstorm whichever way you slice it. The great influx of players wanting to get in on the action was fatal to the servers, and there were errors and crashes as far as pissed off players’ eyes could see. 

I remember a couple solid days of trying to load that first tutorial mission, it failing, finally getting to play through the intro, the game crashing at that point, restarting the whole process again... as gamers’ first world problems go, this is right up there, and I damn well didn’t even want to go through that BS again. So what the hell, Pokémon Go? Why you no learn from that?

The ultra mega popular mobile app had just the same craptacular beginning. Bugs, crashes, glitches, failed logins out the wazzoo. All over the internet, there were death threats being sent at developer Niantic and the team’s next of kin. Threats from nerdly bands of Pokémon vigilantes, who said they’d break into Niantic HQ in the witching hour and take a dump on all the desks if they didn’t make the damn game work.

Now, we’ve got a little insight into why everything went south for Go in those early days.

‘Niantic had both a traffic target and a worst case estimate of five times that amount,’ MCV reports. ‘The actual traffic that hit its servers was 50 times more than its target and ten times greater its worst case scenario.’

Well, damn. There’s also a handy-dandy little line graph, in case you wanted a visual representation of a Godzilla-approaching-Tokyo-in-no-mood-to-be-dicked-around-with sort of moment:

Ouch-amundo. Sure, this was a pretty damn egregious mistake on the developer’s part, but you can see how this was something they couldn’t just magically resolve overnight. Spare a thought for the poor tech guys, next time you’re bitching about something like this. And while you’re at it, stop blaming them for the dumbasses who walk into the path of speeding SUVs because they’re playing Pokémon Go as they cross.