Park's 'Pokemon permit' plan blocked

Rules designed to stop Pokemon hunters "overrunning" parks in Milwaukee County have been suspended following a legal challenge.

Milwaukee's parks appeared in Pokemon Go as Pokestops, real world locations players visit to gather in-game items.

But officials said the volume of players had "unintended consequences" and ordered games-makers to apply for permits to include parks in their apps.

The order will be suspended while the legal challenge is considered.

Trampled grass

Several landmarks in Milwaukee's parks were included as points of interest in Pokemon Go when it launched in 2016.

But the Milwaukee County parks service said the number of players had increased littering in the park, overwhelmed toilet facilities and resulted in "trampled grass".

In January, it introduced an ordinance requiring developers of augmented reality games to obtain a permit before including the parks as points of interest in a game.

Games companies must detail how they will deal with security, waste collection and toilet provision, as part of the application process.

Critics say the requirement might stifle the development of mixed-reality games, which companies such as Apple and Microsoft are investing in.

In April, a legal challenge was brought about by games company Candy Lab.

The company does not make Pokemon Go but is developing a poker app that encourages players to visit real-world locations.

It said video games were protected by the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and claimed the park ordinance violated that right.

A preliminary injunction was granted on Thursday, so the permit requirement can no longer be enforced until the case has been heard.

'Pokémon GO' Decides To Just Go Ahead And Release Lugia And Articuno, It's Great

Earlier this morning, it appeared that there was a plan. The plan involved things like catch challenges, reward tiers, a special Legendary Raid at Chicago's Grant Park followed by a global unlock 24 hours later, and so forth. That plan didn't work. Pokémon GO Fest, on a practical level, was a spectacular failure: people in the park weren't able to play the game, throwing a massive wrench into the works for a global event that was meant to serve as a grand celebration of the game's first year. So, Niantic decide to go ahead and make a new plan. At one point, it seemed they were going to give out Lugia without a raid and release it for battling over the next 48 hours, which seemed lame. That plan seemed to go by the wayside as well. Ditching a carefully choreographed reveal, the developer decided to just go ahead and release two Legendary Birds: Lugia and Articuno, to be specific. And it's great.

In Chicago, Pokémon GO Fest became something closer to what people had been hoping to get out of the day-long event. Within a moment of Niantic's announcement, gyms within a two-mile radius lit up with special raids and people one again spilled out of their hotels to go out hunting. I first noticed it once I heard cheering outside my window: the Articuno outside was jamming up traffic on the relatively narrow street, people screaming "Articuno!" when that "gotcha" finally appeared on screen. It was a tough fight, but there were a lot of us.

The same was true for a couple of Lugias inside the park across the street— trainers all hunched around, sitting on the ground, taking out the brand new legendaries as fast as they came up, telling everyone around them to use Pinap berries because of the guaranteed catch. It was what I had imagined with Pokémon GO Fest to begin with, now finally made possible by breaking it out of the confines of Grant Park. In about an hour I had amassed a small non-canonical army of fierce flying Pokémon, buoyed by the suite of bonuses to XP, stardust, buddy catching, candy and everything else Niantic had decided to throw out there.

Sure, the whole thing was fan service. The event itself had turned out to be a complete bust, so the developer decided to just go ahead and throw as much as they could at the Pokémonning populous to make them happy. And guess what? That turned out to work just fine. Pokémon GO can be a stingy, stingy game, and so when the developer decides to turn on the faucet it can be an exciting experience, especially when the streets are flooded with thousands of eager trainers.

It doesn't seem that the raids achieved that kind of density around the world, but the birds were popping up a day early just the same. No, it wasn't the plan. But it seems to have produced a sort of giddy excitement.

For a bit, it was like taking a time machine back to last summer, with everyone out in the street, exploring and finding Pokémon. In some ways, that's why Pokémon GO Fest the actual event was doomed to fail: it tried to rope in an experience that's meant to live outside. On a practical level, it failed because you just couldn't cram that many people playing the game in one spot and expect the technical side of things to hold. On a conceptual level, it failed because it just wasn't what this game is meant to be.

The craziness of the Chicago's Legendary hour doesn't really serve to excuse the fact that nothing about Pokémon GO Fest went off as advertized. People still stood out for three hours in the beating sun to gain access to an event that revolved around a broken app. But the mad fun of that moment certainly served to remind everyone here of just what's special about a game unlike anything else on the market (except Ingress).

Pokemon Go-playing driver kills woman in Japan

A driver playing Pokemon Go behind the wheel has hit and killed a woman in Japan, say police.

The 39-year-old man hit two pedestrians in Tokushima city late on Tuesday. The other woman was seriously injured.

The driver, who has been taken into custody, told police he was not watching the road carefully.

Police, speaking late on Wednesday, said it was the first fatal accident in Japan involving the hugely popular augmented reality game.

Pokemon Go creator Niantic expressed "deep condolences to the family", in a statement, according to media reports. The smartphone app gives players a warning if it detects they might be in a moving vehicle.

Since the game was released in July, public spaces in many parts of the world have been filled with players chasing virtual monsters on their phones.

Many heritage sites and sensitive locations have banned people from playing on their premises.

However, recent data suggests that since its peak in late July when almost 45 million people worldwide were playing the game its popularity may have started to dwindle.

Why Pokemon Go may have passed its peak

It is quite possibly the biggest gaming phenomenon of the smartphone age - but is Pokemon Go's popularity dwindling?

Since the augmented-reality app launched in July, Pokemon Go has swept up gamers in a craze of monster-catching across the world.

Just a week after its release in the US, Apple said the game had broken the App Store record for most downloads in a week. Gamers chasing down the likes of Pikachu and Snorlax have filled public spaces - such as New York's Central Park - with congregations of people wandering about with phones in hand.

But now, a month since Pokemon Go's release, independent analysis suggests its popularity has plummeted.

Some churn was only to be expected - the huge publicity it generated was always going to have attracted players who would briefly try it out and then set it aside.

However, the drop-off occurred during a period when the app was launching across much of Asia and Latin America as well as France.

How many players has Pokemon Go lost?

No official figures on Pokemon Go's downloads have been made public, but according to data compiled by Axiom Capital Management, more than 10 million players have turned away since mid-July.

Pokemon Go's Daily Active Users (DAUs) - an industry metric that determines how many people switch on an app each day - suggested that the game edged close to 45 million users on 17 July. By 16 August, that figure fell to just above 30 million.

This would imply that Pokemon Go has lost more than 10 million daily active users in a month, which equates to nearly a quarter of its DAUs.

Crucially, this is during a phase where Pokemon Go was launching across Brazil, Indonesia, the Philippines and dozens of other countries, meaning that the fall in popularity had significantly offset growth in new territories.

Pokemon Go's downloads, engagement, and time spent on the app per day are all in decline too, according to Axiom's data.

Nevertheless, in Apple's UK App Store charts, Pokemon Go is currently in seventh place in the "free" category, and still in first place on the "top-grossing" chart. The game is similarly popular on Google's Play store.