Although Pokemon GO continues to be a well-liked game and money-maker for Niantic Labs, the mobile AR game developer hasn’t had much success with its other attempts are recreating that magic. CATAN: World Explorers, the mobile AR recreation of a highly popular parlour game, is the newest evidence of its failure. While the heavyweight brand should have garnered interest and resources, it seems that it just wasn’t meant to be because the game is shutting down soon after spending a year in early access.
It is beginning to desire Pokemon GO may be a one-off success that couldn’t be recreated, even by Niantic Labs itself. The AR developers’ first game, Ingress, had a faithful following but did not go mainstream enough to be considered profitable. Harry Potter: Wizards Unite tried to recreate the Pokemon GO magic with another internationally known property, but its implementation felt too on the brink of Pokemon attend to be seen as its own thing.
Niantic Labs announced in late 2019 that it had been performing on the CATAN IP to show the planet into the AR game board. The sport revolves around resource collection and management, building settlements, and trading with other players. Sounds simple for board games and regular computer games, but translating the mechanics to real-world AR proved to be quite just an insurmountable challenge, or a minimum of that’s the rationale Niantic Labs is giving.
According to its announcement, they developed mechanics that became too complicated and too far, far away from the first CATAN that it didn’t add up to erupt with it. Instead, the developers have decided only to cut their losses and pack up the sport on November 18th, 2021, at 7 am UTC. Niantic, however, has already removed the sport from app stores and removed real-money purchases from the in-game store.
CATAN: World Explorers now joins the mobile AR graveyard that Minecraft Earth started occupying early this year. Developed by Mojang itself, the AR version of the favoured sandbox game also lasted just a year before it proved to be an excessive amount of an unprofitable waste of resources to stay alive. Unfortunately, only a few mobile AR games have managed to survive and succeed, making Pokemon GO truly one among a sort.
