Pokémon Go loses its luster, sheds more than 10M users
The loss and subsequent banning of maps and map users made nearly everyone I know stop playing, especially in the total absence of an official replacement or a compelling reason to continue.Hearing my map ding was enough cause to make me leap out of my chair and run to the nearby park at midnight to catch something I wanted, and there'd usually be the usual lure-users and a few map-users out there at the same time. Once I was out, I'd play for a while, hit a gym or two, maybe finish an egg, and go home. This was still really fun when it was disabled.Without the map, there's no reason for me to leave my house. There's no group of people at work who stand up when a Blastoise is announced into our #pokemon channel, sending us all on a brief Pokemon/coffee walk down the road.That's all on top of the poor quality of the game, which the maps and community had overcome.Niantic being selfish and not understanding their own game or the culture around it seems to have squandered one of the greatest opportunities a company has ever had.(I get that the maps were spamming them, but that's a technical challenge. A bunch of well funded ex-googlers ought to be up to the challenge of scaling/handling unexpected load for a chance like this.)