Pokemon GO Fest Attendees Hit Niantic With A Class Action Lawsuit

It's not really a secret that Niantic's Pokemon GO Fest could have gone better. A lot better, in fact, as the festival was pretty much a disaster in every conceviable way. Niantic has tried to make good on the unfortunate situation, but those efforts apparently aren't satisfactory to some who were in attendance, as one event-goer has brought a class-action lawsuit against the company.

Johnathan Norton, a Pokemon GO player who flew all the way out from California to attend the Chicago festival, is suing Niantic for the cost of his travel, according to Polygon. Thomas Zimmerman, an attorney operating in Chicago, has taken the case, and says that "20 or 30" other attendees have joined the lawsuit.

A lot went wrong during Pokemon GO Fest, with the neither the game's servers nor the cellular networks it relied upon up to the task of handling the immense load from all of the attendees. Niantic has tried to make good on these issues by handing out the legendary Pokemon players were supposed to hunt for during the event, along with refunding the price of admission and offering attendees $100 worth of in-game currency.

Even with those bonuses, though, Norton and Zimmerman argue that the people who traveled to attend the event ultimately didn't get what was promised, and wouldn't have made the trip in the first place if they would have known that it would turn out to be such a mess. To someone on the outside looking in, that seems like a reasonable argument. Whether or not the courts will agree is another matter entirely.

Niantic, for its part, chose not to comment on this pending litigation. We'll see what happens with this lawsuit in the coming weeks and months, but one thing's for sure: some folks who attended the event aren't happy, and they don't think Niantic is doing enough to make things right.