Pokémon GO was a phenomenon that was hard to miss back when it initially launched in 2016. Everyone and their grandmother were out that summer terrorising their local neighbourhoods in search of illusive Charizards or Dratinis, that lay just out of reach beyond a “Do Not Enter” sign on a spiked fence with an oh-so-tempting gap to traverse through. A lot has changed since those early beginnings, nearly 9 years and 9 Generations worth of Pokémon updates later and Niantic has an AR game swelling with so much content that it’s simply daunting to jump back if you quit after that initial summer.
More Content, More Fun?
As you’d expect with the benefit of having Pokémon as your base IP, you are never short for content inspiration, and Niantic has certainly noticed this. From raid battles, Dynamax, Mega Evolution and even Shadow Pokémon from the Gamecube RPGs finding their way to the game, you’re never far from a new encounter opportunity whilst traversing your local neighbourhood. As one would expect though, with more content comes more expectations from the player. Raid battles, for instance, are typically recommended to be completed with friends, and whilst the easier raid battles can be done alone to get powerful legendary Pokémon you will need friends or a community as invested as you are. The same applies to Mega Evolutions, these can sometimes be even more difficult than legendary raid battles. A formidable team is needed to make a dent in monsters like Mega Latios or Latias or the Primal forms of Kyogre and Groudon.
We encounter similar issues when it comes to the game’s battle system outside of raids. In order to successfully battle Team GO Rocket and their leaders, you have to have either very strong powered-up Pokémon or a few of the Mega Evolutions and Legendaries to even stand a chance against some of their teams. To those lacking the local community to take down such beasts, this can feel gruelling and unfair. This extends to PvP which utilises the same battle system, if you’re not raiding or utilising mega evolutions you will struggle to compete, although this is subsided by giving you infrequent legendary Pokémon when you climb the higher ranks (assuming you can get that high).
Lockdown Pains
With a series as experienced as Pokémon, Niantic is spoilt for choice on mechanics and features to introduce into their relatively simple game. And whilst most of these additions have been seen favourably, not all go down quite as well as Mega Evolutions or trading. Two of these were introduced in the aftermath of the lockdown boom that GO experienced. Whilst everyone was trapped at home and unable to meet their communities to play the game, Niantic introduced a revolutionary variant of a feature that would make them billions over the next several years: the remote raid pass.
Simple in concept, the remote pass allowed you to remotely join any raid battle in your area and even introduced the ability to invite and/or join friends hosting their own raid battles so that you could take down larger foes without needing to be in the immediate proximity of potentially contagious people. As a result of this, and lockdown meaning more people were home, bored and willing to play mobile games more than usual this quickly took off and hundreds of remote raid communities exploded into existence. It was something of a renaissance and the game’s popularity rivalled the early launch days, but, all good things must come to an end.
First was the introduction of Shadow Raid battles, a new form of raids that allowed you to fight against a Team GO Rocket corrupted Shadow Pokémon for better stat distribution and more rewards than fighting a regular grunt, with the caveat being you had to be at the gym so remote raids were not possible. Another new form appeared after raid days, a blue raid egg with an evolved form of the community Pokémon that, once defeated, caused the area around the gym to spawn the community Pokémon with the same shiny odds as the day for 30 minutes.
It was evident coming out of the quarantine that Niantic wanted to push their main mantra again, “Let’s GO Outside”, which is commendable and understandable when their mission statement is to increase player health. They shortly after released routes (a new way to get rarer Pokémon by walking) and daily incense (which did the same thing for 15 minutes and had unique Pokémon attached to it), both good reasons to go out and interact with your local area. Then there was Dynamax, a relatively recent feature in the main series, that Niantic decided was to be exclusively local battles too. This is fundamentally fine, I believe that a game like Pokémon GO pushing walking, going outdoors and interacting with parks and landmarks is a fundamental piece of the game and should be encouraged. The goodwill towards this idea ended when Niantic decided when adding Gigantamax that they would make the battles so difficult that you’d need 30-40 local people who have invested at least some time and resources into the system as you could only use dynamax Pokémon you’ve caught to fight these battles. This practically shuts out nearly every rural community from being able to interact with this feature, but Niantic had a solution: charge the players to make it easier.
Microtransaction Hell
I wish to preface this segment with a little disclaimer, I am not against microtransactions in free-to-play games if they offer something of value and do not worsen the player experience when interacted with. Fundamentally, if they are non-intrusive and can be a good optional use of your money then they are not a major problem, especially if they are upfront and honest (unlike lootboxes). For the first 4 years of Pokémon GO‘s life, the only ways to spend money were either on extra items or cosmetics, i.e. you could easily play the game without spending a penny and would have a similar experience to other players by hoarding coins from gyms and using them as and when needed.
In 2019, Niantic introduced paid research, which at first, was not too egregious and featured legendary Pokémon, cosmetics, and tonnes of items as rewards— but this was a slippery slope. What started as quarterly special research to complete at your own leisure, slowly turned into monthly timed research that needed to be completed before the deadline or you will lose the content you paid for. This gets more egregious still; at the time of writing every event has a timed research attached to it, and the major event for the month also has multiple tiers of paid timed research, as well as quarterly ticketed events that can cost £10-15 just to experience. This means, before items, cosmetics or other microtransactions, Niantic is charging hundreds of dollars or pounds a year just to play the events to their fullest extent, which they make almost a necessity to get the most out of these events and ensure you can keep up with the Pokedex correctly.
This would be egregious on its own, but in 2023 they doubled the price of remote raid passes from 100 coins to 195, making them much more expensive. If you were relying on those due to the lack of local community and can’t keep up with the natural flow of 50 coins per day, the game got just that much more expensive. Somehow this gets worse; as mentioned in the previous section, Niantic has started charging for Max Mushrooms which you can use to make the almost impossible Gigantamax raids easier, instead of rebalancing the game themselves.
I wish I could say that this was the end, but it really isn’t. In 2025 Niantic doubled the price of Community Day timed research from 99p to £2 with no change in rewards, just because they can. And to put the icing on the cake, they have introduced a battle pass-styled system with multiple paid tiers that allow you to complete tasks to level up to get items and mythical Pokémon (only if you pay) to try and squeeze any further pennies out of you they can, it’s frankly pretty gross.
We have witnessed a game where you could once chip in a few pounds or dollars a month to supplement the experience has turned into a pay-to-play barrage of new ways to spend money and I haven’t even gone into the physical events like Safari Zone or Pokémon GO Fest. It’s clear that after losing a massive amount of revenue from the remote pass limitation and paid increase that they are trying to recuperate and make as much money from the IP as possible before it eventually goes the way of Wizards Unite, and as a long time player, I’m frankly sick of being constantly treated like a wallet rather than a person.
Video game completionist and 3D platformer connoisseur, Riley is a fan of the whimsical frenzy of bright and colourful characters that blessed us in the late 90's. Their favourite game's are Spyro, Persona 5 and Super Mario Sunshine.
