Niantic to settle Pokémon GO Fest lawsuit for over $1.5M | Hacker News Reader

Niantic to settle Pokémon GO Fest lawsuit for over $1.5M

techcrunch.com

46 pointsportofcall28 comments

If you want to be sure people don't try to organize things like this in the future, this is how you do it.

a) They already refunded all the money the received.

b) And now it's costing them even more money...

c) And a big portion of the problem was "Widespread cellular connectivity," which, yes, a sophisticated organizer can mitigate... But really, it's not their fault. Users "BYOB" (Bring Your Own Bandwidth.)

So, it was supposed to be fun, and it turned into a liability instead. This precedent makes it way less likely for people to ever want to do something similar again.

They're paying $75 per person, because the people didn't get to play a game when they got there.

Thanks, lawyers.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Why are you blaming lawyers instead of the company that should have been able to predict this?

Because the lawyers are the ones making a solid profit on the whole thing?

What entities in this case are trying to create value?

Sounds like the company did a "best effort" to make it work, then made reasonable attempts to make it right.

The way class action lawsuits work, the lawyers pushing it get a large percentage of the award - commonly 30% or more. Notice that the lawyer's bar association also stands to divide up any remaining money.

So the lawyers win. Consumers may break even. The company loses, and they probably would not have made a direct profit on the event in any case. Future consumers also lose because anyone who sees this result will hesitate to try again.

> If you want to be sure people don't try to organize things like this in the future, this is how you do it.

If by “things like this” you mean poorly organized events, then yes, this is how we discourage companies from organizing an event like this unless they actually have done their homework properly.

Plenty of events like this get organized all around the world, go very well, and people are happy to return the following year. There’s not going to be a shortage of festivals, conventions, etc any time soon.

If these sort of lawsuits discourage the Fyre and Niantic people who have no clue as to what they’re doing, then great.

Niantic were 100% responsible of making sure the connections would work. They are a large organisation and 100% should have hired technicians to test the networks before organizing the event. That's basic due diligence.

That's like organizing an event on the roof of a building, but the roof wasn't made to support so many people and it caves in during the event. Sure they didn't build the building, but they still should've checked it could handle their needs.

So where do we draw the line? If Niantic says "hang out on a boat and we'll give you rare water pokémon" and players charter a boat and the boat sinks, is it Niantic's fault? What if there's inclement weather that makes it impossible to play in the area that some players are in? To what end should Niantic be responsible for things that are prerequisite to using their service?

Let's say I held a picnic potluck that required you to bring some potato salad to get in. The local Trader Joe's is out of potato salad, so lots of people can't get in (despite there being other ways of procuring potato salad). Is it my fault that I didn't coordinate with grocery stores to make sure there would be enough?

Your first example isn't representative, unless Niantic organised the event in a place where there was only one boat people could possibly rent for practical reasons in the area. I would argue this makes it really stupid planning by Niantic.

In your second example, if Trader Joe is the only potato shop remotely close, then it was indeed also really stupid planning by Niantic

> making sure the connections would work

The cellular data connections? From all the mobile providers?

And it's not good enough to refund, but they have to PAY?

If your cellular connection goes down, do you get a refund? Do you sue? Is that really your relationship with your provider? And now somehow someone making a GAME is supposed to make that relationship BETTER? How exactly?

It was poor planning and I assume dishonesty on the local organizers part. I attend school a couple blocks from where Fest was held. Even by myself, I almost always lose signal in the exact area where Fest was held. Its usually not much of a big deal because I can walk for another block and get signal back, but if you're having an event in that exact spot that require cell signal, you're going to have a bad time.

Why does everyone have to sue everyone else in the states? People mess up, get over it. It wasn't wise to spend money on travelling in the first place imo.

If you don't actively defend your copyright, you can lose it. That might be part of it.

How does copyright have anything to do with this class action lawsuit?

You're confusing copyright with a trademark. You have to apply for and actively defend a trademark otherwise you lose enforcement over that trademark and it becomes genericised, however copyright is granted upon creation of a work with no need to 'apply' for copyright protection and authors can selectively enforce their copyright if they choose to do so without losing their rights over a work.

A large company organized an event from which they profited. Due to negligence, they didn't fulfill their promises and people suffered financially. I don't understand your issue with suing them?

To expand, there's a common perception that in the United States people are constantly filing frivolous lawsuits, but this isn't the case. I think when people hear the results what happens after lawsuits against large companies, they hear them from the perspective of companies who are sued and have a vested interested in making the lawsuit seem "frivolous" in order to protect their reputation.

They didn't profit though... Tickets were refunded and customers got $100 to use in the game.

Tickets to the event? That’s all well and good, what about the travel to and from?

Niantic isn't a travel booking company... they weren't making money off of that, so why should they be at all liable for those kinds of costs?

I can't think of any situation where that makes sense. If I book a trip to a water park and book an outside hotel, and the water park shuts because of very bad weather, should they reimburse me for my hotel? Of course not! So why should Niantic do so?

The difference here is that weather is out of the organizer’s control, while this is pure negligence. If you host an event that never could have worked because you failed at really basic logistics like “can people get coverage here”, it makes sense to me that you get to cover travel costs that people wasted getting to your broken event.

They profited in that it was a publicity event for their product. It's naive to think that they didn't make money off these peoples' plight in some way.

The app was in such terrible shape at that point, both on the client side with crashes and etc, and random login issues on the server side ... I can't imagine how they thought they were going to pull that off.

My guess is the event organising team was so disconnected from the technical team it didn’t even occur to them to investigate capacity at the site. They just assumed.

They told the technical team in no unclear words that the event is happening on these dates, and if the bugs are not fixed by then, heads are going to roll.

Sticking their (management) heads on pikes comes to mind ...

How does something like this event happen? Pokémon Go was huge, and I’d just expect that Niantic would have hired competent organizers. 20,000 pissed off people has a huge negative word-of-mouth potential, and it’s not like they had to have this thing in the first place.

Anyone with experience in this world, how does a big company miss the boat so hard?

Niantic is a Google spinout and basically suffers all the arrogance and inertia that Google suffers from with none of the upside of being gigantic.

This is topped off with a technical staff that doesn't really have any greybeards to hit people with a cluebat when necessary.

Finally, Niantic is privately held, so it's executive staff are not subject to being fired after having repeatedly screwed up (Pokemon Go basically suffered from all the same problems that Ingress suffered from only even moreso).

Put all that together and you have a perfect storm to create multiple, high-visibility fuckups.

For a long time with Pokemon Go, I assumed that the problem was that Nintendo put so many shackles on Niantic that Niantic really couldn't do anything. The more I hear about Niantic, the less I believe that to be true, and the more I believe that Niantic management are just idiots.

Hmm. I know at least one of the Niantic technical staff, and is a very competent, experienced software engineer.

Poor event planning, I can believe. Marketing promotions getting ahead of infrastructure, I've been there.

But I know that a great gaming experience is very, very important to this team...

I wish I could write this without sounding like astro-turfing. The Fest was a horrible failure, burned the goodwill of exactly the fans that Niantic treasured most.

Developers, marketing, executive staff should all be required to use the shitty bandwidth that everyone else has to live with.

> required to use

Also the HDDs that a large segment still uses.

These days I notice some stuff taking forever on HDD machines that I suppose just flies on the devs/testers SSDs ...

But its not the job of the software developers to research and plan the wireless coverage of the location, its the job of the team planning the event.

Here in germany for big festivals every carrier places a truck with mounted wireless antenas nearby the event location to ensure a good wireless coverage. I dont know how it is in chicago, but for such an event the planners should have asked the big providers if they can do something to not have wireless outages. But maybe this would have costed them some money they wanted to spare.

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