Pokemon Go Fest was supposed to be an incredible event, but it seems like Niantic absolutely butchered it. The festival kicked off with 3 main events in which people had to catch as many Pokemon as possible in a small time window. By the time the first window closed, half of the people were not inside of the event and were still in line. By the time the second window opened, many people were still caught outside and couldn’t catch any Pokemon.

As Niantic staff began to take the stage for different presentations, they were met with deafening boos from the crowd. Throughout the event, many chants started up where the crowd would yell at Niantic to fix their game. The majority of attendees couldn’t even log into the Pokemon Go servers because they were so busy. Niantic ended up handing out refunds to people who suffered from the poor planning and overall terrible event.

The Twitch stream that was supposed to go live ended up being an hour late. Once it began, people could hear somebody fumbling around with a USB cord for about a minute. Niantic then attempted to play a video about the new Raid System, but the audio was lagging so badly that they turned it off and didn’t bring it back up. By the time I had logged into the Twitch stream, all I heard was soft music playing over a picture that said “Pokemon Go Fest”.

I’m extremely disappointed in Niantic and I can’t believe that they held such a terrible event. They’re trying to bring this game back to life and they had every opportunity in the world to do so in Chicago, but they blew it. If this is how the events are going to be, there’s no way that anybody will be buying a ticket any time soon. Fix your game and fix your presentations Niantic, please.