'Pokémon Go' comes to 26 new countries, but server issues keep many from playing
Niantic, San Francisco-based developer of the planetary hit Pokémon Go, has significantly ramped up the game's global release, launching it in 26 new countries on Saturday.
The augmented reality mobile game is now available in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Greenland, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, and Switzerland. It's a free download in either Google's Play Store or Apple's App Store.
Despite gamers' pleas for Niantic to release the game in their respective market, the company may have been a little too eager to launch to so many markets as once. Shortly after launch, many gamers reported on social media that the game is slow to load or even completely unavailable to download. I've managed to play for a couple of minutes in Croatia before the game stopped working; it's still unavailable at the time of this writing, hours after launch.
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After the initial launch in Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. on July 6, the game soon became available in Germany, the UK, Spain, Italy and Portugal. The total number of countries where the game is available is now 34.
The game became an instant hit after the launch, quickly catching up with services such as Tinder, Snapchat and even Facebook in terms of popularity.
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Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
