Some Attendees of Pokemon Go Fest Are Filing A Lawsuit Against Niantic

Some Pokemon Go Fest attendees are filing a lawsuit against Niantic, the developer of the popular mobile app and organizer of the official fan event. They made the trip to Chicago to find out they're not able to play due to technical issues, so now they're seeking reimbursement for travel expenses.

According to Polygon, Chicago-based attorney Thomas Zimmerman was contacted by Jonathan Northan and "20 or 30" other attendees about the problems they faced at Pokemon Go Fest.

"[Norton] paid to fly out [to Chicago] for the festival, and had to wait for several hours in line, just like most everybody else in order to get in," Zimmerman said "However, when he--and other attendees--arrived, they were unable to play the game and thus unable to capture the rare Pokemon available there."

Niantic offered the opportunity to catch rare Pokemon at Pokemon Go Fest, and many players spent money to make it to the event with the hopes of catching rarer creatures yet were not able to do so. Niantic failed to give the overall experience they promised, and even Verizon blamed the developer for it.

"Niantic is not offering to refund people's travel expenses for coming to Chicago," Zimmerman said. "Most of the people came from out of state, many people from other countries--I talked to someone who flew in from Japan."

"The issue is, what was promised, what was the incentive that people relied on and the representations that people relied on to buy a ticket and make travel plans and fly to Chicago to participate in this festival, would they have done that had they known that that was not going to be lived up to and they weren't going to get the experience that was represented?" Zimmerman added.

Polygon asked Niantic for a statement, the developer said that it "does not comment on pending legal matters."

Niantic explained why people experienced technical issues at the event.

"Technical issues with our game software caused client crashes and interfered with gameplay for some users," CEO John Hanke explained. "A more protracted problem was caused by oversaturation of the mobile data networks of some network providers. This caused many attendees to be unable to access Pokémon Go or other Internet services. Network congestion also led to a login issue which affected some users able to access the Internet."

Niantic extended the amount of locations and time that rare Pokemon could be caught throughout Chicago after players couldn't manage to get the game functioning well at the event.

Related: Pokemon Go's Missing Team Leader Found