This Is Not A Drill: Pokemon Go Is Live In Malaysia

After long anticipation by the mainstream Malaysian folks, and a heated controversy where religious officials are not too keen about it coming to Malaysia, Pokemon Go has indeed arrived officially on both the Apple App Store and Google’s Play Store. A quick search of the title in the respective store and it should be there right now, assuming your Android phone is up to snuff on running it.

Developers Niantic has slowly expanding its server to accomodate more countries to join the adventure of catching all 145 available pokemons, to which one pokemon trainer has just achieved. The latest entry includes 15 countries including Brunei, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore as well as Malaysia.

Despite its growing success, it is suffering from many controversies and issues, from updates removing features and Niantic’s stance on having pokemon tracking sites, to issues of tresspassing as people have complained their personal property have been turned into a game element without consent, to which one guy had went on and filing charges. On the local end, one particular religious official, the mufti of Federal Territories, declared the game to be prohibited for Muslims due to the many negative impacts including breach of private data and safety issues. Fair complaints, as issues of data privacy were brought up earlier before and there were cases of people falling off ledges due to not paying attention while hunting for pokemons.

But all those issues are a growing pain for an evolutionary step of social play. Niantic’s previous effort Ingress is a hit and with the wide appeal of Pokemons, the concept of going out in real life to do virtual things, or augmented reality games, is now widespread and as such, the social repercussions are much more prevalent. It will be a while until we can adapt to the current technology, something already seen in other disruptive apps like ridesharing services (Uber, Lyft, etc.) that is making sweeping changes to transportation that leaves certain parties unhappy.

That aside, now we can talk about the important choices of Pokemon Go: Which team will you pick? Valor? Mystic? Or the glorious team Instinct?

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