If you live in the midwest and are out only a ticket and a tank of gas for your trip to the botched Pokemon Go event a week and change ago, you were probably mollified by Niantic’s vow to reimburse your ticket fee and grant you some free in-game currency. If you spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars to travel to the event from far away, however, $100 in Pokemon Go cash is not going to cut it. That’s the impetus behind a new class-action lawsuit being filed on behalf of “20 or 30” people who say that Niantic failed to keep its promises and should reimburse their travel.
“We’re not seeking any relief with respect to the failure to get legendary Pokémon, because Niantic is offering that,” the attorney representing the plaintiffs, Thomas Zimmerman, explained to Polygon. “But Niantic is not offering to refund people’s travel expenses for coming to Chicago. Most of the people came from out of state, many people from other countries — I talked to someone who flew in from Japan.”
Given just how much money Niantic made from RMT during a single day of the event, we figure the studio’s probably good to reimburse some overseas guests for travel, but in light of how hard the studio has fought to avoid legal culpability for its actions in the past, we doubt it’ll be that simple.
Niantic has said it won’t comment on the lawsuit, but it did delay some of its events in Europe — the Copenhagen and Prague event originally scheduled for August 5th and the Stockholm and Amsterdam event planned for August 12th — until an unspecified date later in the fall. Other events this month in Japan and Europe will go on as anticipated.
