Niantic postpones European Pokemon Go events after Chicago debacle
Niantic hasn’t done a very good job at managing how popular Pokemon Go is among gamers, especially considering the first ever Pokemon Go Fest in Chicago ended in complete disaster. Things went so bad for the company that they issued an apology to all attendees and refunded their ticket costs, in addition to giving them $100 worth of PokeCoins to spend in-game.
That wasn’t enough for some attendees, who contacted a Chicago-based attorney in order to file a lawsuit against Niantic for false advertising the event. These folks are hoping the class action suit will result in their travel costs to and from Chicago being covered by Niantic.
Perhaps to avoid getting slapped with more lawsuits, Niantic has decided to postpone the upcoming Pokemon Go Fest events that were slated to happen in Europe this weekend.
In order to guarantee the best possible gameplay experience for European Trainers, we have decided to postpone the events in Europe scheduled for August 5 (Copenhagen and Prague) and August 12 (Stockholm and Amsterdam) until a date later in the Fall. No other scheduled events are affected including the event scheduled for Yokohama, Japan on August 14 and the events scheduled for September 16 in France, Spain, and Germany.
It’s interesting because while the events in Denmark, Czech Republic, Sweden, and Netherlands events are canceled, the events slated for Japan and France, Spain, and Germany are still on. This is likely to displease plenty of people who were planning to travel for those events since a week really isn’t enough notice to adjust travel plans.