Niantic clarifies increased Pokemon GO spawn radius was 'unintended' and will get 'reverted'

Just when players thought Niantic was introducing a feature to improve their popular Pokemon GO mobile title, the million-dollar company has taken it away. For those who have not played the mobile game in the past week or so, it was graced with a bug-fix-turned-quality-of-life feature that increased the interaction range by a considerable margin.

To be more specific, the interaction range is the distance at which points in the game can be accessed. This includes gameplay mechanics like Pokemon encounters and Pokestop photo disk interactions.

With this quality of life feature suddenly revoked by the company, many players have taken to social media to voice their distaste for Niantic.

With this being one of the major negative turning points for the company, players will likely seek the facts about this situation before making their final opinions about the change, Niantic, and Pokemon GO as a whole.

So what do we know about this change, and how is the community reacting?

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The Tragic Downfall of Pokemon GO: Niantic's spiral into cartoonish levels of greed

Following Niantic's string of anti-consumer practices, the Pokemon GO community has remained unhappy for a while. Most apparent is the company's deletion of certain accessibility features like remote raiding and extended event timers.

However, some players were optimistic about the company following the release of the Season of Hidden Gems, which gave players a reason to be excited about the future.

But Niantic revoked a highly-anticipated quality-of-life feature, writing it off as a bug. While this may seem unprofessional on Niantic's behalf, indicating they care little for the community, observant individuals may see the domino effect that caused this course of action.

Starting during the 2020 pandemic, Niantic introduced some accessibility features for Pokemon GO that allowed the company to keep their player numbers consistent despite the social distancing and travel regulations.

However, what the company did not consider when implementing these changes is the consequences that would come once the pandemic concluded.

This started with the removal of the six-hour time limit for Community Day events before spiraling to the introduction of Elite Raids, which required players to attend in person. This led to the Remote Raid Pass nerfs that pushed for players to now physically attend standard Raid Battles.

April 2023 has reportedly been the worst month for Pokemon GO since its launch, with many players leaving the game following anti-consumer practices, leaving Niantic in a tricky spot. They can either try to earn back fan loyalty at the cost of high profits or double down and make life difficult for the rest.

However, it appears that the million-dollar developer has chosen the latter option.

Although the latest interaction range change is a step in the right direction, Niantic has realized that increasing interaction ranges means that players would not have to relocate as much, thus cutting down on the money they make from selling location data to advertisers.

This is why the feature was scrapped, with Niantic sweeping it under the metaphorical rug, claiming it was a glitch all along.