Niantic Labs has rolled out the Pokemon GO app in 15 new countries in the Asia and Oceania region. The new launch was announced on Niantic’s website as well as Pokemon GO’s Facebook and Twitter pages.
A major expansion of Pokemon Go in Asian continent was expected, after the company blocked third-party trackers earlier this week. The newly countries included are: Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Brunei, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Laos, Solomon Islands, Palau and Federated States of Micronesia. However, three obvious countries – India, China and South Korea – are not yet in new list.
Niantic said some recent delays in the rollout were linked to the third-party websites and apps that were making the tracking and catching of Pokémon easier for the users.
According to Niantic, the “seemingly innocuous sites” were consuming precious server resources, thus hurting abilities to deliver the game to new and existing players.
“Running a product like Pokémon GO at scale is challenging. Those challenges have been amplified by third parties attempting to access our servers in various ways outside of the game itself,” the game maker said.
“We recently rolled out Pokémon GO to Latin America including Brazil. We were very excited to finally be able to take this step. We were delayed in doing that due to aggressive efforts by third parties to access our servers outside of the Pokémon GO game client and our terms of service. We blocked some more of those attempts yesterday.”
Pokemon Go was first launched on July 6 in the United States, before being subsequently rolled out in Australia, New Zealand, Europe and Canada. In Japan, the game was launched on July 21, and then it made available for players in Hong Kong and Brazil.
It is not yet clear when will the game be officially launched in India, one of the biggest smartphone markets in the world. In case of China, some major challenges like regulations and Pokemon GO’s reliance on Google Maps are obstructing the roll out. In Korea, the game is unofficially available in some regions, although security issues with Google Maps have been delaying the official launch.
Pokemon GO has seen 100 million downloads since its launch. In the U.S., the rising popularity of the game has also resulted in increase in sales of portable smartphone battery backups.
The company said it has received feedback from users, and is currently “actively working” on the Nearby feature which had developed a bug and was taken off completely.
