Niantic, the studio behind mobile augmented reality games, like Pokémon Go, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, and Input, reportedly punished more than 5 million cheaters since the beginning of 2020, with more than 1 million players receiving permanent bans across the world. three games.
“We are committed to ensuring fair gameplay across our game portfolio,” Niantic’s blog post reads. “Every day, new forms of cheating or counterfeiting tools are made available on the Internet, and we are continually working to combat these cheaters and focus on improving our detection and enforcement, as they have no place in our games.”
Niantic also said that 90% of players who received a warning immediately stopped cheating, a number the company considers “quite encouraging” as it seeks to differentiate between casual disregard for its rules and “more blatant” attempts to outperform developers. .
That said, it should be noted that “cheating” on Niantic releases often means falsifying someone’s location with third party programs to trick the game into believing that you’re crossing the city and not, you know, sitting across from computer. This kind of behavior rarely destroys the experience of other users, but it erodes the recipe for Niantic, the biggest sin under capitalism.
Pokémon Go did more than $ 4 billion for Niantic since its launch in 2016. At least $ 1 billion of that came in 2020 alone.