Niantic’s AR Catan game ends November 18

Niantic stops development on Catania: explorers of the world. Announced in the, the studio had yet to officially release the game, and it was only available in Early Access in select markets outside of the United States. Later today, Niantic plans to remove Explorers of the world from the App Store before shutting down the servers that power the game on November 18, making it unplayable afterwards. With today’s announcement, the augmented reality title won’t roll out to other countries, and Niantic has removed all in-app purchases from the experience.

It’s unclear exactly what went wrong with development, but it looks like scope drift may have played a role in Niantic’s decision to cancel the project. “We had a vision to trade, harvest and build the world in seasonal play and reset the board every month, just like you do with every new game you play at home,” the company said in a blog post spotted. through . “But trying to adapt such a well-designed board game to a global, location-based massively multiplayer online game (MMO) was a tough challenge.”

Niantic notes that the lessons learned from working on Explorers of the world will continue to inform future projects. However, it’s hard to say what the cancellation will mean for the company’s other games. Following the , various companies have partnered with Niantic to create similar AR experiences using their own properties. More notable examples include and. These same companies can now realize that they are replicating the success of Pokémon Go maybe not as easy as they initially thought.