Niantic released a game that basically didn't have a game inside of it. I played along with the other 45 million people that played it at some point. It was exciting to run around looking for Pokemon but it took me 3 weeks of intense playing to fill about 40% of my pokedex (small town) and then things just stopped spawning. Playing just became a chore and a grind and I ultimately quit because without new stuff to do and no game mechanics its just a broken buggy shell of a game.

It's getting hate because Niantic is being seen as an inept company that was too small to take on something as big as Pokemon. The game has only been out for a little over a month but the big criticisms are:

• servers were down for almost a week of the first month because Niantic has piss-poor spaghetti code that is basically a re-skinned version of another game Ingress which is a reskinned version of another app called Field trip. The codebase is completely screwed up.

• They killed the only feature (3 steps) that allowed you to track pokemon. When the game was released you could see pokemon on a radar and it told you how far you were with step markers so you could actually wander around and hunt for them. Without that feature the game became literally mindless wandering and hoping for something to appear randomly.

• Servers again shit the bed after the latest update and locked millions of users out of their accounts for over a day, sometimes two days.

• Cheating on an almost unprecedented scale. At one point nearly every pokegym in the game was controlled by botters and spoofers. Some of the biggest channels on Twitch for two solid weeks of the last month were people blatantly cheating at the game.

• Niantic communicated absolutely nothing to its users while the game was down and everything was broken.

• Even when the servers were back up the game constantly crashes and freezes on players.

• Zero balance and no game mechanics. Playing in gyms is little more than mashing your finger as fast as you can with pokemon that are so out of balance only 5 of the 142 currently released are even usable.

They basically released a "game" that was almost in pre-beta state. It's a buggy, crashing, hot mess with no content besides the Pokemon brand and they squandered the goodwill of millions of fans for a quick cash grab.

This game COULD have been a multi-year multi-billion dollar franchise but Niantic just couldn't put together a decent product.

Around 15 million of the total 45 million have already quit and my prediction is that by the end of September active daily users will have dropped by another 10 million and the game will fall into obscurity and stop being played by November when Sun and Moon is out.