Aside from the fact that it became one of the biggest mobile app launches, Pokemon Go had a launch that we could compare to something of a rough ride. Skyrocketing the iOS app store top charts within 24 hours after it launched, players have reported intermittent connections to no connectivity at all. Word has spread over social media that players are having a hard time playing the game due to a plethora of network errors.
Because of these connectivity issues, John Hanke - Niantic CEO, speaks to Business Insider announcing that the company will be delaying the global launch for Pokemon Go while working on server issues, quoting the roll out will be "paused until we're comfortable."
Stability errors are a regular thing in online games, especially during launch day. Delaying Pokémon Go's worldwide release does slightly hamper Niantic's promise to deliver the game to new players, but the demand for download seems to be overwhelming that even the latest servers cannot handle.
Shedding some light to non-technical people
A Google blog post describing the association between Google Cloud and Pokemon Go has a brilliant way of explaining the popular app's stop and start launch - which, by the way we, can associate why others already have the latest updates and we just sit in a corner, refreshing Google Play or App Store, in a hope to get the update as soon as possible.
Today's most popular augmenter reality game, Pokemon Go, uses a range of Google Cloud features, but most importantly, it uses Google Cloud Datastore as its primary database for the game's Pokemon captures, making this one of the best ways to gauge the AR game's overall popularity.
Niantic then set a 'launch target' for player traffic, they also covered the 'just in case' scenario predicting and preparing what can be done about the Datastore in case this happens.
A picture indeed is worth a thousand words. As illustrated on the graph below, even with huge preparations, Niantic's estimates turned out to be conservative to the highest proportions. Their worst case scenario is that traffic levels will only reach 5 times higher than the original plan. However, reality struck them as it climbed up to the '50 times' mark.
Looking at that graph, it clearly explains why other countries have to wait to play Pokemon Go for the first time, and for existing users to also wait for their turn to update even though their friends already have.
IGN also has created a news video to elaborate more:
