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Niantic is shutting down AR Game CATAN World Explorers

The team behind CATAN World Explorers has announced that after a year of testing, the game will be shutting down later this year.

This news comes from a statement published over on the game’s community forums, which you can read here.

The game will be sunsetting on November 18th, 2021, 7am UTC. Players will also be able to convert any unused in-game currency to Pokémon GO.

To send off the game with one last hurrah, the developers will be increasing bonuses for the last few weeks and in-game seasons.

The team originally set out to build a game that turned the world into a CATAN game board. We had a vision for trading, harvesting, and building up the world in seasonal play and resetting the board each month, just like you do for each new game you play at home. But trying to adapt such a well-designed board game to a global, location-based Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game was a tough challenge. We’re so proud of the game we made, however we got a little too complicated and a little too far from the original CATAN game.

Developer team

Although there wasn’t a specific reason given out for cancellation, the development team thought the game strayed a little too far from the board game.

The shutdown is sad to see, but the developers have confirmed they’re already back and working hard on more games!

Gameplay and Review for CATAN World Explorers

One could probably speculate that COVID played a huge part in the shut down of CATAN World Explorers.

The pandemic hit augmented reality games especially hard. We even saw the AR game Minecraft Earth shut down earlier this year too.

Niantic is currently working on a Transformers augmented reality game, which you can read more about here!

They are also developing a Pikmin AR game in partnership with Nintendo. To stay up to date with all things augmented reality, follow us on Twitter!

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