A Google Maps Glitch Turned This Korean Fishing Town Into a 'Pokemon Go' Haven (vice.com)

Madison Margolin, reporting for Motherboard: A glitch in Google Maps has turned the small fishing town of Sokcho, South Korea, into a Pokemon Go tourist haven. The globally popular mobile game hasn't launched yet in South Korea, but that hasn't stopped clever gamers from finding a way to play it anyways. The city of Sokcho is taking full advantage of it, according to this video by the Wall Street Journal. Because of Cold War era laws preventing North Korea from obtaining maps of the country, the use of Google Maps is restricted in South Korea, the WSJ reports. However, a fluke in the system allows it to work in Sokcho, in the northeast corner of the country, just outside the DMZ (demilitarized zone) between North and South Korea. Sokcho is outside the range of indexing grids that Pokemon Go developers used for mapping restrictions of South Korea and other countries.

Comments

Re:Someone Please Explain The Glitch

[gurps_npc]

Certain areas, such as the entire country of South Korea, are legally forbidden from using GPS style location determination. They are afraid an invading army/missile will use it for targeting.

They put a lock on such services based on geography.

But the lock is not perfect, it uses a grid to determine which areas are GPS allowable and which are not.

The grid is supposed to exclude all of South Korea, but a small town happens to be just outside of their grid. So GPS devices work there.

Pokemon Go requires access to your GPS as part of the game (or rather, they designed the game to need access to your GPS so they can get your geolocation for advertising purposes).

As such, you can't play Pokemon Go in South Korea, EXCEPT in that one small village.

Re:Someone Please Explain The Glitch

[Anonymous Coward]

It has nothing to do with GPS or GLONASS. It's because Pokemon Go (like Ingress) uses Google Maps data, and Google Maps data is less specific in South Korea due to national security restrictions. (2, 3, and this Reddit thread about why Ingress doesn't work in South Korea)

Since Pokemon Go features are tied to map data on roads, landmarks, and buildings, and South Korean maps don't have that data, Pokemon Go doesn't work... except in Sochko, which as a quirk of the grid system is exempt from the data granularity restriction.

Items as well for Ingress

[sethstorm]

Some sponsored game items:

AXA, an insurance company, sponsors a shield item.
Mitsubishi's financial group (MUFG) sponsors an "interest bearing container" that randomly duplicates items
Softbank, a Japanese mobile phone network provider, sponsors a link booster.
Lawson, a Japanese convenience store chain, sponsors an energy cube booster.

Re:Someone Please Explain The Glitch

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently, Niantic Labs, the company in partnership with Nintendo and The Pokémon Company and a main driver of the augmented reality genre has had previous issues with their games in Korea. This may be roughly linked with Korea’s outdated laws that restrict the use of mapping data as that has in turn slowed down Google Maps ability to gain a foothold within Korea. Users of the Niantic’s other augmented reality game, Ingress, had been complaining for years about playing in a black landscape in a mapless world, voicing their concerns through the use of the hashtags: #map4korea #niantic #blackout.

Source: Gangnam Gamers.

GPS is perfectly legal in South Korea. This is not an issue with GPS. The game does not work in most of the country because the developer implemented a geo-fence. They used a grid system which covered most of the country but missed the far northeastern corner. The geo-fence is the result of their past experience with mapping issues in South Korea. As speculated above, this is likely to be the result of the restrictions on map providers in South Korea. The developer plans to working around the issues and release the game to South Korea.