Back in June 2020, Niantic announced Catan – World Explorers, an augmented reality map exploration game in the same vein as Pokémon GO, the developer's bread and butter. Catan, of course, is a popular board game that's had several digital adaptations published on the Play Store, and it would seem Niantic was chomping at the bit to utilize its AR platform to turn the entire world into a Catan gameboard, but this has not panned out. Thanks to a recent blog post, we now know Niantic plans to sunset Catan – World Explorers on November 18th. Luckily, the game never made it out of testing, and so only those living in the game's soft-launch regions will be affected.

As of Friday's announcement, Catan – World Explorers is no longer available in the Play Store in the few regions it was being tested in, though the servers will remain functional until November 18th. So if you happen to live in New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Switzerland, or Singapore and currently have the game installed, it will work until the official close date. In-app purchases are no longer functional, so if you still have some in-game currency burning a hole in your pocket, you're going to want to spend those funds before November. New gameplay events are planned for the next few months, so at least there should be content to play through as the game winds down.

Looking at the current Play Store reviews, it's easy to see why Niantic has chosen to shutter Catan – World Explorers. It would seem the game was filled with bugs and crashing issues, and this has only gotten worse since the initial soft launch rolled out in July 2020. There are also complaints of content hidden behind paywalls, nothing new for a mobile game, but hardly appealing to fans of Catan, explaining the excruciatingly low 2.7-star rating. Niantic claims things got a "little too complicated" during development, but somehow I bet many of those complications were self-inflicted.

Another day, another mobile game bites the dust. This time around, the game wasn't even finished yet, but it's not like every augmented reality title Niantic pumps out is going to be a hit. Perhaps if the studio set its sights higher than cut and past AR games, this would be less of an issue, but it would seem Niantic has found its niche, so I doubt Catan – World Explorers will be the last AR game Niantic will test and close in the coming years. Now who wants to place bets Transformers is next?

Source: Catan World Explorers