During the summer of 2016, Pokemon Go took
the world by storm. The rollout was slow, with the game launching
in new countries one by one at a pretty slow pace. In Iran, many people were eagerly awaiting
the game’s official launch. But then, all of a sudden, the government
made an announcement: Pokemon Go was banned. And, people weren’t exactly happy about
it. I really remember the slow, slow launch of
Pokemon Go. I live in the UK, and we didn’t get the
game for a while, even when other countries were happily catching Pokemon like nobody’s
business. Iran was much the same: people had two options. Wait for the game to officially come out in
the region, or use a VPN to get the game early. VPNs can be used to fake your location, so
to get Pokemon Go early, you could route all of your web traffic through some random computer
in the US for instance, and voila! You could download Pokemon Go before it was
actually available in your country. And this is what many people did in Iran! Like this person... “I'm in shiraz and there are a bunch of
Pokestops and gyms that I found.” Or someone else who says... “I do have a VPN. I'm level 9 on Pokemon Go, I found a bunch
of Pokestops. The game works fine with Iran, thank God.” Except, even back then there were some issues
that people were having. “I live in Iran," says one person, "and
I used [a] VPN to install it but there is no Pokemon or Pokestops. It's only the roads and sometimes Pokemon
prints, never anything else anywhere. But I'm in the middle of Tehran... it doesn't
make sense, I've been around the city and haven't seen a single mart or gym anywhere. I'm catching Pokemon but I can't really do
anything else." So, while some users seemed to be finding
Pokemon fine, a lot of other people said their game maps just looked empty. Which wasn’t really a surprise: the game
wasn’t actually OUT in Iran, so weird bugs and glitches were to be expected. What WASN’T to be expected though was a
statement from the government. So, just when Pokemon Go had started rolling
out country by country across the world, the game’s developers, Niantic, received an
email from the Iran Computer and Video Games Foundation, also known as the IRCG. Now, the IRCG is technically a non-profit
organization in Iran, and they publish various video-games in the region. However, the people who set up this non-profit
were the government, so the IRCG has pretty close ties with the Iranian government. And aside from just publishing videogames,
this organisation also get to decide which games are allowed in Iran, and which ones
get banned. There’s some pretty strict rules about what
types of things are allowed to be shown in videogames, so the IRCG have banned a number
of games in the past. Which brings us to Pokemon Go. The IRCG sent an email out to the developers
Niantic, which said this: “if the game wants to come to the Iranian market it has to pass
through the filtering of the Iran Computer and Video Games Foundation along with their
cooperation, otherwise we have to filter and block this game in our market.” The IRCG had two specific demands for Niantic. Firstly, Niantic had to set up servers in
Iran, and store any data for Iranian users on those servers only. They couldn’t store anything about the users
from Iran in their US data centres. That was the first condition. The second is that Niantic had to work together
with the Iran Computer and Video Games Foundation to check through all of the locations where
Pokemon could be found. “There should not be locations that users
are prohibited to be in, like the military or national security locations”, said a
spokesperson for the IRCG. Now, while that request is somewhat understandable,
the logistics of checking that no prohibited locations were tagged into the game would
be unimaginably time-consuming. I mean Iran is not a small country! So a few days later, Niantic sent their reply
to the email. And they were basically, yeah we’ve don’t
want to launch Pokemon Go in Iran anyway. In their email, they explained “Iran’s
gaming market is a complicated market for developers and global companies” so they
weren’t planning on launching Pokemon Go in the country. And while there were a fair number of people
who used a VPN to download the game anyway, in real numbers it wasn’t that many people. It was such a hassle to go through that trouble,
especially when Pokemon wasn’t that big in the country anyway. A well known Iranian game developer called
Mohammad Mahdi Behfarrad explained, “From knowing that the main Pokemon story is not
very known in Iran, it may not have the same speed in connecting with the Iranian players.” So, it seemed like things had been sorted
out: Niantic just wouldn't launch Pokemon Go in Iran. Except, a few days later, the Iranian government
stepped in with a very unexpected reaction. BREAKING NEWS! Pokemon Go banned by Iranian authorities over
'security'. Authorities in Iran have banned the Pokemon
Go app because of unspecified "security concerns". ...Yeah, just after it seemed like the issue
between Niantic and the IRCG had been settled, headlines broke in various newspapers announcing
that Pokemon Go had been banned in Iran! Now, if you look more closely into things,
this sudden ban didn’t come from the IRCG this time. No, a much higher up body from within the
Iranian government itself called the High Council of Virtual Spaces actually stepped
in and banned the game, completely separate to what the IRCG had been up to. And, their reasons for doing so are pretty
mysterious. So, the BBC actually tried to figure out what
was going on with this. After asking various people involved for any
kind of answer, they ended up speaking with an important Iranian religious official. He explained that the Pokemon series as a
whole was banned in parts of the country, because it contained so called “forbidden
images”. Plus, you could gamble in some of the games,
which was a big no-no. According to this man, Pokemon Go was banned
for these same reasons. But, he could easily have been wrong. The ban on Pokemon games only applies to certain
parts of Iran. Pokemon Go, on the other hand, was banned
across all of Iran. So if he was wrong, then what’s the real
reason? Well, the most likely reason is all the stuff
we’ve already talked about. The data centres needed to kept inside the
country, and certain places like the military bases needed to be removed from the map. Niantic didn’t do either of those things,
so the High council of Virtual Spaces stepped in, and issued a complete ban on the game. But the thing is, Niantic weren’t affected. Because, they were never planning on launching
in Iran - they were very clear about that in their email. This new ban didn’t actually do anything. People could still download Pokemon Go using
a VPN, it just wasn’t officially available in the country. ...Which, it never was going to be, anyway! But the headlines are true. Pokemon Go was banned by Iranian authorities
over 'security'. It just strikes me as a slightly bizarre decision. But hey, it’s not that’s the only bad
decision that Iran’s government have made. In amongst persecution of LGBT people, various
minorities, and numerous other human rights offensives, banning Pokemon Go is really relatively
trivial. Hey, thanks for watching to the end! If you found this video interesting, you might
enjoy my video about the Nintendo game rated 18+. It’s on screen right now. And you can subscribe to the channel to catch
next week’s video ASAP. Okie dokie, see you then! Bye!
