Rest In Peace, Pokemon Go
Pokemon Go is in its death throes. It’s thrashing in the water in the wake of a Sharpedo attack. It’s taking shallow, shuddering breaths after a vicious mauling on Pyroar safari. There’s a poison that has been spreading through the game for years, but it was more likely caused by a Meowth than a Koffing.
I’m talking about money. Mobile games have some of the worst standards in the industry when it comes to ethical monetisation, and to its credit, Pokemon Go has always been at the better end of the scale. The only gacha mechanics are the eggs, little Pokemon loot boxes in their own right, for which you have to buy incubators with premium currency to hatch. There are always a few Pokemon exclusive to eggs, but they usually enter the regular rotation after a few months, through a Community Day or other event. Free to play Pokemon Go is a test of patience.
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Then there are raids. While you can challenge one raid boss a day for free, in person, raid passes otherwise cost about a quid, depending on where you are in the world. When the pandemic hit, and players couldn’t congregate at local churches, shops, or murals to battle Legendary Pokemon any more, Niantic introduced remote raid passes, which allowed you to invite friends from afar to join the fun. These cost a little bit more, at about £1.50, but were a way to keep playing without leaving the house.
via Niantic
Developer Niantic recently raised the remote raid pass prices to around £2, in order to encourage players to get back outside. This did not go down well. Instead of getting outside or coughing up the extra cash as Niantic had hoped, players rebelled and many stopped playing completely. Niantic has refuted reports of low revenue this month, but my personal experience is of a game that has taken a bullet to the head – and Niantic was the one who aimed the gun.
My local WhatsApp group, where we used to organise raids and get together for Community Days, is silent these days. The game never recovered from the pandemic, and has never reached the heights of that first summer in 2016, but there was still a group of hardcore players keeping local communities afloat. Until recently, that is. Now there’s nothing.
via Niantic
I was planning on continuing playing the game, and likely still will in some limited form, but my community is gone. Vanished. We had the full spectrum of players in our group: hardcore raid grinders, casual players wanting a Community Day shiny, tourists looking to explore the local Gyms, people playing from their bikes or crawling alongside the walking party in their cars (I’ll never understand that one), main series players, mobile-only aficionados, young kids dragging their parents along, young parents dragging their kids along, the lot. Imagine any type of Pokemon fan, and they joined us in Liverpool city centre for events. Many of these people tagged along when they saw the group of weirdos staring at our phones next to the Radio City tower, but more were in the WhatsApp group to make arrangements, find friends, and generally chat about the game.
My phone didn’t buzz once for Kleavor Raid Day. I mean, a raid-based event after the developer had just increased prices on remote raid passes? What did it expect? Sure, there were free passes for players raiding in-person, but if your group has fallen apart and nobody’s responding to your remote invitations due to the increased price, what is there to do?
We were arguably the perfect Pokemon Go players in Niantic’s eyes. We got out and played outside, raided in person, and spent hard cash on passes. We weren’t all whales, but I’d wager most of us would throw a few quid at the game each month. If that group drifts apart because of price increases, then what hope does the developer have of enticing casuals to keep playing its game?
This really feels like the end. I’m sure Pokemon Go will continue for some time, a shell of its former self, as more and more players drift away and fewer spend money. Niantic hasn’t offered any incentives to keep players involved. Boosting rewards for in-person raids would have been a far better way to get players out of the house than simply charging them more to sit on the sofa – and it wouldn’t alienate disabled players that way, either.
If Niantic was set on increasing the prices of remote raids, which it clearly was, it needed to give something back to the players who have been loyal for seven years. Better raid rewards, perhaps. A big event with shinies aplenty, maybe. Instead, we got an overly-expensive raid day, a Community Day for a Pokemon most players already have shiny, and a new Pokemon released exclusively (and incredibly rarely) in eggs. Kleavor and Larvesta are paywalled PokeDex entries, and lord knows I don’t need another shiny Togekiss, especially not with the underwhelming attack Aura Sphere.
Niantic could have saved some face in light of the price increases by offering a better product, but three of the most cynical events in recent memory have compounded its problems and turned players away. There’s a universe where the developer properly incentivised in-person raiding, followed it up with a Mega Rayquaza event awarding loads of XL Candy, and then introduced shiny Larvesta in a Community Day. That might have been the defibrillator that restarted Pokemon Go’s heart, reinvigorated the community, and sent a clear message that the developer cares about its players. In this universe, Niantic is sending a message that it only cares about our money, so we won’t be performing CPR.
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Source: TheGamer
