Pokémon Go dataminers forced to close down as Niantic ups game security

There are plenty of community staples that Pokémon Go players have grown accustomed to seeing and using as a resource over the years, but nothing can last forever. In the latest blow to diehard Pokémon Go users, the most reliable data miner group is essentially going on “life support.”

In a June 23 tweet, the PokéMiners group announced a “soft shutdown” to proceedings following further obfuscation changes to the APK which resulted in a number of the team’s tools breaking, while also citing general burnout over the project.

PokéMiners is a team of dedicated Pokémon Go players that built tools capable of scraping data and information from the game—even if it was hidden in the backend and not easily viewable. 

This project gradually expanded into full teardowns for game updates providing insight into features and early looks at upcoming content. It even became a warning system for changes coming to Pokémon Go that might impact the community in a negative light.

For example, PokéMiners were among the first to flag what would eventually become the massive Remote Raid changes that landed Niantic in hot water back in March. Unfortunately, the last several months have seen Niantic make more changes to limit the team’s efficiency, even if indirectly, leading to the data miners going into a “soft” shutdown for the entire project.

“Niantic has changed obfuscation in 275’s APK, for the sixth time since the start of the year. So most of our tools broke on this update,” PokéMiners founder Marty said in a statement on the official PokéMiners website. “To fix it we would have to give up our weekend again to get things running. Considering [Niantic] are clearly intentionally doing this at this point to make our lives more difficult (even after we said all those nice things about them, how rude), we are just done with this cat-and-mouse game.”

Marty notes this has been a gradual shift, pointing to the team’s decision to cut back on coverage last December, and again in recent months. The team cites Niantic’s “decisions, actions, and responses to the community” as a significant factor in their frustration and gradual withdrawal from the game.

Everyone involved at PokéMiners reportedly put in anywhere from 30 to 40 hours of work every week before the December cutback to ensure reports were accurate and their tools functioned with all of Niantic’s asset systems, all while sharing this information with the Pokémon Go community. And, with these recent changes, it looks like Mega Rayquaza’s upcoming debut in the game is what sealed the team’s fate.

Related: Mega Rayquaza crashes into Pokémon Go Fest 2023—with one major twist 

“I was looking forward to Mega Ray[quaza] for years, and even though we knew it was coming based on their hints and our data mines, I was surprised when I saw the official announcement I felt nothing,” Marty said. “Then when I read the official mechanic for how it would work (which again we had hints of but didn’t know specifically it was for Ray) I just sighed as it’s yet another McGuffin needed to enjoy the same basic gameplay we’ve had for years. That was a sign that perhaps I’m just over PoGo at this point.”

As a direct result of Niantic’s continued changes breaking the team’s tools, the time it would take to continue fixing those tools, and the team’s decline in overall interest for Pokémon Go, PokéMiners is working out exactly what happens next.

For now, the team will continue to report its findings as long as their tools work, but no real resources will be dedicated to fixing them if an update from Niantic breaks them. Additionally, in-depth APK teardowns will no longer be produced, and the team has yet to truly decide if they will continue asset dumping or general maintenance on select tools.

The community aspects of PokéMiners, such as their Discord server, will remain active and the website is going to be up as long as ads and donations from the community cover the cost to support it.

PokéMiners ended their unofficial goodbye by thanking the Pokémon Go community for the support shown over more than four years of coverage. But it is as Marty said: “So we guess it’s up to Niantic now, to decide how fast they kill us off for good.”