The end of an era, as The Silph Road announces that they will be shutting down their site as of May 12, 2023 following the end of their sponsorship by Niantic. The website is now currently down along with the organization as a whole, but the subreddit will continue to exist on its own.
Soon after the release of Pokemon GO in 2016, several fans of the game came together to make up what is now known as The Silph Road. It was a website which offered some of the most up to date, accurate information about Pokemon GO, and was at the forefront of any other third-party information source about the game. Over the past seven years TSR has been a source of information, community-building, and has been an integral part of the Pokemon GO experience as a whole.
For over a year TSR was sponsored by Niantic, but now that the sponsorship is gone, TSR has put out a statement saying that many of the members do not feel financially stable enough to continue the website. As they stated, with an accumulating upkeep cost, coupled with the game's ever-changing landscape, they decided that the best course of action would be to shut down.
Recently Niantic, the company which owns and runs Pokemon GO, has been making a slew of changes to the game which have been heavily frowned upon by fans. These changes have been stated to be towards the betterment of the game, but to many they've only been hampering it. Niantic has been taking the game in a direction which is starkly different than the way many of the fans actually play the game. With the closure of The Silph Road now, many fans are starting to see not just a lack of support from the game developers, but now a lack of support even from the most passionate members of the community.
With 2023 arguably being one of the worst years for Pokemon GO, and now with the closure of The Silph Road, the future of the game is truly in the air right now. With fans being upset, a company unwilling to listen, and the largest community resource now gone, a recipe for disaster has already been put into practice.
