At Niantic, our mission is to draw people outdoors, inspire exploration, encourage exercise, and create connection. Creating a fun and safe environment is fundamental to fulfill this mission, and we are constantly working to ensure players have a safe and enjoyable experience. In the world of gaming, there are few components as vital to the player experience as gameplay fairness, and any action counter to this spirit not only jeopardizes the integrity of the game, but ruins the fun for others.
We understand the importance of fair play, and we’re committed to promoting a fun experience while maintaining a level playing field for all our players. That’s why we are constantly working to develop and improve our anti-cheat and gameplay fairness systems.
What We’re Doing
The goal of preserving gameplay fairness is constant, and an ever-evolving one. As the gaming industry continues to grow and change, so does the challenge of promoting fair play. The last two years have been particularly big for Niantic, seeing the debut of both Peridot and Monster Hunter Now, as well as launching Campfire, Routes and Party Play in Pokémon GO, weekly challenges and social gameplay in Pikmin Bloom, Overclock hacks in Ingress and a brand new reviewing interface in Niantic Wayfarer.
To ensure fairness across our portfolio of games, we have assembled a dedicated team of experts from various fields, including engineering, security, data science and policy, who are responsible for prevention, and for detecting and sanctioning players who are violating the Niantic Terms of Service, Player Guidelines and/or Live Event Code of Conduct.
Over the past year, our team has focused on:
Keeping Operational Excellence: In our efforts to protect our infrastructure from abusive play automation, we have implemented new additional measures for finding bad actors (for eg: enabling stronger device integrity validation in some games - like Ingress).
Vigilance against newer threats: We continually monitor emerging trends, identify potentially suspicious behaviors, verify said behavior through robust data analysis and technical reviews; finally leading up to implementing new fair and proportionate player sanctions.
Improving investigative capabilities: We realize that our proactive systems cannot identify all cheating behaviors, and utilize user reports to identify these gaps. We have invested in providing our investigators with better tooling, thus greatly reducing review times and allowing us to sanction both egregious as well as casual cheaters appropriately.
Listening to our community: We are constantly keeping a pulse on community sentiment across various social channels, which we use as valuable feedback to inform our next course of action. We value transparency and are making regular player-facing updates (improved sanction messages, better responses to appeals, etc.) towards this end, and ensure sanctioned players understand their exact violations and in most cases have a chance to reform.
Our Results
Our approach to gameplay fairness has proven to be highly effective. Since the beginning of 2023, we have enforced more than 120 million account sanctions across all Niantic apps, with more than half of those accounts permanently banned. This number represents violators employing a number of different tactics from location spoofing to rooted devices, from third party apps and automation to map manipulation.
Of course, one of the main tenets in the Niantic gameplay fairness framework is the ability for sanctioned players to reform their behavior and return to our games by playing fairly. This is the basis for our three-strikes approach to anticheat sanctions. Month on month, nearly 80% of players who receive their first strike don’t go on to receive any additional sanctions, resulting in a significant reduction in the usage of third party cheating tools. Additionally, as stated in our policy, some cheating behaviors may result in an immediate account termination without prior warning; and in 2024 led to approximately 9 million sanctions on accounts who were egregiously cheating..
As a reminder, make sure that you are not using any game automation tools at all, are protecting your game accounts by only downloading our apps from official sources (e.g. the App Store, Google Play or the Galaxy Store), not purchasing accounts online or sharing accounts or devices with others, and always abiding by the Niantic Terms and Conditions, Community Guidelines and Live Event Code of Conduct.
With a dedicated gameplay fairness team, the power of technology, and the support of our player community, we strive to maintain a level playing field for every trainer, agent, hunter and user. Meet you out there, in 2025 and beyond!