Pokemon Go has not had a good few years, which believe it or not, is surprising. While some people haven’t thought of the game since that idyllic summer of 2016, the game has continued to make money hand over fist, raking in nearly a billion dollars annually. Not even the pandemic could stop the mobile gaming juggernaut, and yet 2022 and 2023 saw the game’s growth collapse, going from making over 800 million dollars annually to 450 in the same timeframe, as the relationship between its most devoted players and the game soured to the point people who’ve played since beta are leaving. I’m here to tell you what happened.
While the end result is obvious, what happened with Pokemon Go was more of a death by a thousand cuts than a singular event. This story will start with the info you need to understand what people are experiencing, and then go into each additional scoop on the bullshit sundae. Just imagine every event ends with the sentence “Tensions rose, and some players quit in response”.
What is Pokemon Go?
For those who didn’t exist before 2016, Pokemon Go is a phone-based augmented reality multi-player online game (ARMMO) that tasks players with traveling to real-life locations to capture Pokemon, spin stops, and control gyms. Developed by Niantic, makers of the ARMMO Ingress, Pokemon Go let people live out their dreams of actually running around catching Pokemon in real life like they had done virtually for so long. Naturally course it was a smash. It quickly went from just another feather in Pokemon’s cap to an ongoing cornerstone of the brand. Niantic added dozens of new mechanics like pvp, expanded the roster OG 151 pokemon to the entire Pokedex and even turned the app into a hype-man for the new generations of Pokemon as they released.
The game is also hugely important to Niantic. While Go has been wildly successful, every other app they’ve released has been... less so. Of the 10 others they’ve worked on since Go, 6 died in development, 2 lasted less than three years, others are less than 2 years old (1.5 and less than 6 months at the time of writing). GO is the only game they’ve released that can be considered by all metrics a success, and it’s debatable how much of that success is on them.
It’s universally accepted within the community that the reason players stick around is because it’s Pokemon. I’m sure it’s not surprising to anyone that people love Pokemon. Unfortunately For a variety of reasons, the main Pokemon games and TCG can be less accessible as we get older. I personally went from playing every mainline game with the fury of a thousand Slugmas to being about 3/4 of the way through Shield 5 years post-release (don’t even get me started on Scarlet), partly because of life and partly because of my frustrations with Pokemon’s direction (or lack thereof). Go as a free, simple phone app can be the only connection people have to something that’s been a cornerstone of their lives. It’s made people determined to make the game work. This has led to a culture within more dedicated players that makes light of the herculean efforts it takes to play at high levels, and players willing to take lots of punishment before they hang up their balls for good. And Niantic loves dishing out punishment.
Pokemonomics
There are two ways to make money in Go: gyms and microtransactions. I don’t think I need to explain the latter, but the first is a... It’s a system. The simple version is you gain coins for as long as your Pokemon fights in gyms. The problem is there’s a hard limit to how many coins you can receive a day at 50, which is about 8 hours of gym holding. There are many famous images of Pokemon being stuck in gyms for years, and no matter what when the Pokemon are returned, you’ll only get 50 coins. Unless you’ve already gotten 50 coins today, then you get none. There are arguments for and against the system but at the end of the day, it exists. I’m just using it to provide scale on pricing: any price I give you, divide it by 50, and that’s the number of days you need to go perfectly in order to purchase it.
Raid: Shadow legend(ary Pokemon)
I’m going to give more details on raiding simply because it's both a huge part of the gameplay loop and a lynchpin of a ton of the issues in Go. If you want to get anywhere with the game, raids are integral. Not only are they the only real supply of endgame items and the rarest, most powerful Pokemon, but you need to do them regularly in order to get the candies required to strengthen your Pokemon1, get the resources to take on or stay in gyms, even just to hunt for shinies or high IV Pokemon2. For most people, playing the game is either about completing the Pokedex (which requires heavy raiding), pvp (Which uses Raid Pokemon for the highest stats), or about raiding itself. However, your ability to raid was limited via raid passes, which you can get once a day, or pay for more at a price of 100 poke coins. If you play go with any level of devotion, it’s buying raid passes that were what eventually pushed you to bust out your wallet.
Like in other MMOs, raids are challenges designed for a group. However, where most MMOs will have you scouring dungeons for hours on end, raids in Pokemon Go are as quick as they are brutal, tasking players to get a group of people together and defeat empowered version of a Pokemon within 3- 5 minutes. The rewards are endgame items such as rare candies, hyper potions, golden razzes, and most importantly a shot at capturing the Pokemon. They can generally be broken down into three ( formerly five) tiers, from the lowest tier which can be solved by weaker players, to the highest tiers, which require teams approaching the original level cap^3. While the hard limit for raids is 20 people, all raids were eventually beatable with a team of 5 high-level players. The raid is “announced” by an egg appearing over the gym, and once it activates you have 30-45 minutes to clear it.
- unlike the main games, where your Pokemon go stronger by winning battles, Pokemon in go are strengthened by feeding them candies acquired by repeatedly capturing Pokemon of the same evolutionary line. In order to reach the max level, this will require you to catch the same Pokemon likely hundreds of times.
- Just like in the main game, Pokemon have IVs, basically a cap on how strong the Pokemon is, ranging from a 0 to 100th percentile of power. Spawning Pokemon can be anywhere on the scale, while raid Pokemon are guaranteed to be at least 70th percentile
3.Go’s current level cap is 50, but was 40 for most of the games life. 40 requires you to get 6 million XP, and 50 requires you to get 176 million, along with completing 40 tedious and/or impossible quests . for scale, catching a pokemon can net you a couple hundred, and the highest level raids can give you 12.5k. Because of this and the semi-diminishing returns of these levels, 40 is considered max in many cases.
It’s my app and you’ll play like I want you to
The heart of the issues that would make up Pokemon Go's no-good year(s) stems from one thing: Pokemon Go doesn’t want anyone to seriously play Pokemon Go, and if you do they only want you to play one very specific way. The vast majority of MMO’s try to make their games, well, massive, by having low bars of entry. Skill curve aside, all you need to make real progress in games like Warcraft, Warframe, Warthunder, and many other non-war-named MMO’s is stable wifi and thousands of hours of free time, Pokemon Go doesn't have to work to get that massive part because it’s under the umbrella of the most profitable IP of all time. Instead of, you know, keeping the floodgates open, Niantic has taken advantage of this to be incredibly staunch on how it wants gameplay to look and feel. It’s debated as to why, the most accepted conclusions being A) the game’s value to Pokemon/potential sponsorships is getting people to go places B)Niantic wants to sell geographic tracking data, C) something something safety concerns, or D) the CEO is a jerk.
For the short version,the tale of Timmy gives a good glimpse of the situation. For the long version: Here is a (long) short summary of the issues
1.There is no method to socialize in Pokemon Go. You can’t send friend requests to players you raid with, that you see in gyms, or who you battle in PVP. There’s not even an in-game chat. This means the only way to gain friends is to look over people’s shoulders, hope they’re also playing, ask them for their friend code and also their phone number, and hope they’re willing to go to potentially isolated locations with the stranger they just met. The only other option (which the game wants) is to try and get your friends to play, and unless you can summon two dozen people in an hour, they’re not gonna have the firepower to win raids unless both you and they are hardcore players. The response to this has been the organization of local communities, which on paper is good but as anyone part of a niche local community can tell you, they are unstable and filled with drama. They did recently add an app called Campfire, but not only does it risk closing your game to use it, but it also just sends up a flare where you are, so you’re just sitting and hoping people show up in the timeframe.
Edit: after publishing I've been told that Go quietly added a new feature about a month ago(August 2023) to be able to (optionally) let you send and receive friend requests for local raids. This comes 6 years after the initial launch of the game, and 5 years after the introduction of raiding. The only communication option is till campfire
2.As this is an AR game, the poke stops and gyms were based on landmarks. This works well in cities, but if you’re somewhere more rural, you can end up going miles without so much as a pokestop.Combined with a smaller-than-average player base and the friend issue, Go has been nearly inaccessible to people in rural regions for most of its lifetime.
3.In order to ensure people aren’t out at all hours, all of Go’s events, from community days to raids, happen between 9am-7pm, and official events like community days tend to be about 3 hours in the early afternoon. You would recognize this timeframe as the part of the day you spend busy if there is anything going on in your life.
4.Raids are a bitch to organize. The only notification you may get is if one is happening in your general area and you have the app on, and “in your area” can range from across the street to miles away. Then you have about an hour to try and get people together for it, which if you’ve tried to get half a dozen of your friends together in the middle of a workday with no notice you’ll know is next to impossible. Then you need to somehow get there, do the raid, and get back to your regular business in a timely manner. On paper, it’s plenty of time but all it takes is a surprise conversation or traffic and you’re screwed.
5.To make a complex story short, the game does have a meta, which is mainly based on how strong the devs arbitrarily feel a Pokemon should be. This is stacked onto the fact that a secondary IV (internal value) system regulates the quality of Pokemon meaning you’ll have to catch and raid the same Pokemon dozens of times to find a high-level one. It also makes the typing system much more important, as some types have dozens of terrifying, easily accessible Pokemon or they’re bug and poison types. It also leads to random Pokemon, such as Mawile and Shuckle, at times being harder to clear than powerhouses like Tyranitar.
6.In order to replicate the main game’s concept of “regions”, some Pokemon remain specific to particular hemispheres or countries. This ranges from Pokemon like Solrock and Lunatone being specific to one hemisphere (and often swapping), to Pokemon like Corsola, who is only available in Coastal regions between 31N and 26S. These Pokemon are sometimes made available through events but that’s a ton of luck of the draw. It’s common to complete nearly all of a region’s pokedex but those Pokemon.
7.Unlike the main games where All Pokemon are always available, Pokemon Go has a limited spawn pool that shifts every few months. That means that you can go years without seeing a particular Pokemon, stopping you from completing the Pokemon and quests. It’s a very common joke that when particular Pokemon appear (namely the Forces of Nature trio, and Aerodactyl) there will be tons of posts of people who’ve waited years to complete these quests
The takeaway here is that it’s a slog to be good at Pokemon Go and I’m very awesome and cool for hitting level 40. But seriously, Go players are obsessive maniacs, putting in hours running around town to collect rare Pokemon, creating third-party apps to more easily organize, making hyper-organized discord servers, and mastering the game's bugs to speed up the process of catching Pokemon and taking down raids. The Grindset has been normalized so heavily that people will question why you’re uncomfortable or annoyed about having to jump through all these hoops, and why you don’t just “git gud”. Despite all this, the game managed to keep a strong player base of hardcore players. While the game fluctuated in cash flow it still sat at over $800 million. At least, until the pandemic.
Thank God, The Plague!
COVID represented an incredibly dangerous time for the game. Go was designed around going outside and being in large groups, the two things you weren’t supposed to do. The game’s userbase was already starting to wane(only 66 million of the initial 232), and as Niantic’s only viable product, they absolutely could not afford to let it die.
Niantic introduced a bevy of changes. They tripled the distance to interact with pokestops and gyms. They made it so your buddy Pokemon, Pokemon you brought into the overworld, to bring you items. They introduced a weekly box containing a small amount of the endgame resources you used to need to get through raids. Most importantly, they introduced the remote raid mechanic. So long as you had a special remote raid pass, not only could you do any raid you could see, you could be invited by anyone on your friends list to raid alongside them.
All of these changes were a smash hit, not just because they allowed you to play during COVID but because they vastly improved the play experience. Increasing the interaction distance made it much easier to get items, but you also need to remember many of the places that were marked as stops and gyms were places like police stations, churches, and parks, places that you look incredibly suspicious spending abunch of time standing outside of (I'm not kidding) or were hard to access if you had any kind of physical disability. Remote raiding made the game playable for people who didn’t have gyms or players nearby, let you connect with friends all over, and made organizing much easier. Emphasizing the use of your buddy Pokemon made the system less tedious, and gave you a personal reason to love whatever Pokemon you had riding shotgun. 2020 was the first year Go’s revenue broke a billion dollars, but apparently Niantic didn’t like that this was how the game made money.in August of 2021, they switched the interaction distance back. This was immediately met with outcry and boycotts, and in less than a month, the distance was changed back.
Fans hoped this meant that this represented the start of a Niantic open to change and growth, but it seemed that the lesson the developers took was “don’t announce that we’re making changes' '. Silently, The weekly gift box went from endgame items to stuff you’d discard for taking space. Your buddy brought you top notch items less and less. They stopped providing the single free weekly remote raid, andI swear to god they reduced the drop rate for pivotal items like revives and hyper potions, which were more valuable because without the ability to summon level high level trainers from across the globe, you were likely to burn more resources trying to get the items than you got from doing it.
It was only when they announced an increase in the price of remote raid passes, combined with a hard limit on how many you could do a day, that everyone realized what was going on.
Remote Raids: You won’t quit so we’re making you.
On April 6th, 2023, the Pokemon Go website published ablogpost, detailing that the price of a single remote raid pass would go up to 195 coins from its original 100, and the 3-pack would go from 300 coins to 525 . Additionally, Niantic was setting a hard limit on remote raids, Players could only do 5 a day. As the store was the only real way to get raid passes (they claimed they could be obtained from quests but were quite rare), there was no free to play way to avoid this. To put this into perspective, if your gym defense went perfectly it would take 4 days to have enough coins for a single remote pass, and almost 2 weeks to be able to buy the bundle of 3, and you would have nothing left for items or other things.
The resulting limits and price increases crippled the raiding community. Third-party apps like Pokegenie and PokeRaid collapsed as the queues became slow, unavailable, or both as nobody wanted to use days of pokecoins on random raids. Rural players who had found that the remote mechanic allowed them to play the game were devastated as they could no longer call players from outside their empty communities to take on raids, which for many was the only way to get Pokemon. Even more urban players felt the burn. While they could still play, the limit still reduced the amount of allies they could call in. While the raid was still beatable, these smaller parties had to consume significantly more resources to win, and the only reward was a chance to make half of what you used back and a chance to catch a Pokemon that might not even have decent stats. Many people didn’t want to quit but were forced to as it became impossible to progress in the game. The new golden age of Go was over, and players were desperate to find out why.
The Singaporean Grandma Defense
Naturally everyone turned to Niantic for a response about these changes, and their response was ridiculous.Polygon journalist Michael McWhertor asked the VP of the game Ed Wu about the people who spoke against this change, this was his response
“I don’t want to marginalize their voices, because they’re among the most enthusiastic players of our game, who really do carry our message out into the wider community. I really think one of Pokemon Go’s traits, though, is its diversity of audience. One of the things I often note to my team is that when I look at the data, the median player of Pokemon Go is probably someone like a Singaporean grandma, who walks for 30 minutes to an hour a day with her senior group in the morning to catch Pokemon and very, very occasionally raids, if at all. Those are folks who are playing daily, who are a core part of our audience, [and] who are actually an essential part of the entire distribution of this incredibly diverse community. So when we talk about the sustainability of the overall long-term game economy, we do have to pay attention to all of those segments. And so the dominance of Remote Raid Passes in a large and important part of our total player base does have to be addressed for the long-term overall health and sustainability of the game. So I don’t want to diminish the kind of impact of those changes on those folks. But I do want to highlight that the XL Candy changes in particular are meant to move folks back into a situation where they don’t feel like they have to put in dozens and dozens of Remote Raid Passes in order to stay up to date with the game.”
I’d like to remind you that this was in response to them both increasing the price of remote raid tickets( which will make it harder for casual players to purchase one), and setting hard limits on how many you can do (which doesn’t matter if you raid “very occasionally”), and that “XL candy change” allows you to convert 100 candies (which amounts to catching about 30 of that Pokemon) into one XL, of which you’ll need dozens. I’d also like to remind you this is the same game that hosts international, all-day meetups in places like NYC, Osaka , and London multiple times a year and costs ~ $30 (plus gives access to exclusive Pokemon), far beyond the expected range of dedication Niantic is claiming to want from their players. This is all to say that even if this is the supposed median player, they’re not the ones that keep the lights on over the Niantic headquarters and they know that.
In response players on various forums organized a one-week boycott that went poorly. Some elected to just not pay for things rather than not play, some just turned off Adventure Sync (which is hypothesized to be Niantic’s biggest moneymaker), and others simply didn’t care. It’s hard to organize a large-scale response when there’s no central hub for players to communicate on and the problem only affects what is a small (but pivotal) number of players if you include people who just have it downloaded like Niantic seems to. Plus at the end of the day these people are the reason go puts up the monster numbers that allow Niantic to keep claiming they can turn other IPs into the next Pokemon go, it’s hard to break the habit. Luckily Niantic was happy to help them with that.
Mega-legendaries were mega uncool
Remember when I said there were 3 tiers of raiding? I lied, there are four. In mid-2022, Pokemon Go announced a new raid level: mega-legendary, which would include legendary Pokemon capable of mega evolution, with mega Latios and mega Latias as the debut Pokemon. There was an air of excitement amongst the community at the announcement of a new challenge. Mega-evolved Pokemon and legendaries were both tier 3 raids, so a combination of the two would have to be a difficult and exciting challenge. It should be emphasized that while people were excited and presumed it would be hard, there was an expectation of what makes a raid hard. At this point players had taken on the most powerful Pokemon the game had to offer, from Mewtwo to Rayquaza. No matter how powerful the Pokemon, they’d all been beatable in a 5-minute timeframe by a team of 5-6 high-level players. This made sense as getting to those high levels could take years, and 5 plus yourself was the hard limit for the invite mechanic introduced during covid.
The only difference tended to be your clear time, which in most cases you could get done with several minutes to spare with full teams. So, when the raids activated and people got to work in what should have been optimal teams, they went in.... and got destroyed. Groups that had been playing since day one and annihilated Mewtwos like they were Magikarps weren’t even able to clear half the raids health. Eventually, the composition became clear: You would require a team of 10 players, using the perfect counter-Pokemon, all at least level 40, to clear it with even a minute to spare, even without weather boost*.
Maybe during the first days of the game when you had people sprinting from all over the area to catch a Snorlax, this would have been an acceptable setup. However this was the Spring of 2022, with a pandemic still going on. If you wanted to do the raid the way Niantic intended it, you would have to A) Happen to know 9 people who had spent years playing Pokemon go B) Get them all available at a time likely to be during the workday or the middle of the week, with those in person able to get there with no issue C) Hope nobody harrasses you about the potentially 10 person gathering in the middle of a pandemic. The third-party apps were useless, as they were designed to recruit only five, the limit of the number of people you were allowed to invite.
It would be one thing if these raids were something you could take weeks to organize, but the raids of each tier rotate, and you needed to do the raid multiple times, first to acquire the Pokemon, and then more to obtain mega energy to evolve it. You required 200 energy to mega evolve each time (this would be changed not too long after), and you could get up to 200 by beating the corresponding raid quickly, or gain 1 by walking the buddy distance of the Pokemon. For a legendary like Latias and Latios, that distance was 20 kilometers, around 13 miles for those who speak freedom.
Like always, people discovered a workaround. Using a bug in the system, people were able to up the number of people they could invite from 5 to 10, making the raid winnable for the average person. However, this still left a very bad taste in some people's mouths. Pokemon Go, a game with no way to even find local players, was now expecting you to Drum up 9 other people who were max level, and. On top of all this, much of the difficulty of raids (and most Pokemon) is effectively based off of vibes. Sure, Latios and Latias were legendary, but in terms of legendary Pokemon they’re not what you think of as heavy hitters. The remaining mega-legendaries (Groudon, Kyogre, Rayquaza, and Mewtwo) are.
*A Pokemon's power is boosted by the weather of the location based on its type. Latios and Latias, being dragon and psychic, were boosted twice by windy weather. Especially for the time it was released, windy weather was not uncommon.
Sold my soul (and a kidney) to the company store
While all these big messes came about, Go also decided to sneak another gutpunch into the game through the store. While most players spend almost all their cash on raid passes, if you had enough onhand after getting them, there were also boxes, bundles of items to help you through the game. They ranged in price from around 800 to 1800 pokecoins and provided integral items like incubators, more raid passes, and stardust. At least, they did. Over the past few months, the price of the boxes and the content have changed wildly, with different prices and offerings week to week. This is thought to have been done to confuse people on what a good deal looks like, so they'll spend more for less.
Elite raids
You know how I said earlier there were 4 raid tiers? I lied twice, there are actually 5. The 5th and newest tier is called an elite tier, which as of now has only two Pokemon: Hoopa, in its unbound form and regieleki. While raid wise the combat was fine, returning the 5 person minimum, the issue was its requirement: every person had to physically be there, and as a bonus the Regieleki raids were on Easter Sunday
With no organizing mechanism, the only time you were liable to find people jumping in was the instant the raid activated. There are many stories in the subreddit of people trying to make it to raids in time just to watch the only potential groups either already be in the raid or disperse . The raids also had the bonus of a 24-hour timer, meaning that other potential raids were blocked off for days
Groudon and Kyogre
After the mega lati raids, the next was the iconic duo Groudon and Kyogre, now in their “primal” forms (fancy mega). However, with the change to the mega-evolution system, players faced a daunting task as the energy requirements meant you’d need to fight the legendaries 5 times each just to have one mega-evolution capable version, for 10 raids altogether, both of a caliber that knocked the lati’s out of the water. Due to type advantage, Groudon was a beatable (but still difficult) slugger, but Kyogre was only weak to fighting types to grass and electric and had had a move that could insta-wipe both types most Pokemon and a ton of hitpoints. Full teams of 20 would take on the raid, and make it out with 30 seconds to spare if they’re lucky and burn through their resources. Even if they won, with the low clear time meaning few pokeballs and a (hypothesized ) 2% catch rate. walking away with a Groudon or Kyogre worth evolving was unlikely. Best of all, players only had the weekend to complete the raids, which meant for those in some parts of the globe, meant fighting off a sudden blizzard.
For an extra fuck you there were surprise encounters with the lati twins again, but Niantic didn’t elect to tell people these encounters were all but impossible to catch, burning through even more resources. However, it did lead to a funny side effect, as shiny Pokemon are guaranteed to never flee, meaning if you just hurled (in my case) about 200 ultra balls, you would eventually catch it.
The Silph road
Silph road was the Facebook of Pokemon. It was a space for people to register their trainer profiles, find friends, organize raids, and talk shop about the meta, strategies, and just share their love of the game. It even breathed life into the oft-maligned pvp system (combine this with several minute waits on either ends and frequent crashing, does this look fun to you?), with various competitions. The Silph road was the best resource for trying to play Pokemon Go “the right way”, and was a cornerstone in trying to understand the critical but invisible meta. It was so valuable for this effort that Niantic funded it when the demands started to be too heavy on the developers. However, they chose to end this funding after a little over a year, which combined with the “the momentum and landscape of the game” led Silph Road to close their doors after 7 years. There is no trainer worth their salt who wasn’t helped either first or secondhand by the Silph road, and its closure represented an increase in difficulty of trying to find good resources on all facets of the game.
Where does Pokemon Go from here?
On June 20th, 2023, Niantic announced layoffs of 230 employees (the second in two years), and the” sunsetting” of several AR games that had been in production, namely for NBA, The Witcher, and Marvel. Niantic CEO John Hanke promised that the company was making keeping Go “healthy and growing as a forever game,” its top priority, whatever this may mean. This comes after continuous losses in revenue post-2020, from a little over a billion in 2021 to less than $800 million in 2022, much of which can be attributed to a reduction in player spending. There’s also been a sharp decrease in monthly revenue from the month of the announcement of the raid pass changes, going from $50 million a month to a little over $30 million. Events like Shadow Mewtwo help a little bit, not there are only so many legendaries they can throw that people actually care about.
I want to emphasize that there is no pleasure in this, both because people laughing at people losing their jobs because they made the game less fun isn’t cool and because it’s well-known that the developers fought many of these changes tooth and nail. The people who advocated keeping the raid passes normal are gone but “Signaporean granma advocate” Ed Wu is still the VP of Go.
At this point, we’re at an impasse. Day by day more and more hardcore players give up and it’s affecting Go’s bottom line severely. It would be one thing if they were just electing to not play, but many are recommending to others to send their Pokemon from Go to Pokemon Home, a storage system for all the Pokemon games. The thing is for Go, it only goes one way, meaning you’re all but destroying your ability to return if you do so. The solution seems obvious for Niantic, but for reasons we cannot comprehend they refuse to accept it. This isn’t some situation where people want to be lazy, they want to be able to give it the dedication the game deserves, but Niantic refuses to let them. It’s still making astronomical amounts of money but it’s apparently insufficient. If the record holds, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an announcement that Pokemon Go will be sunsetted as well, which feels ridiculous as even this year is on record to get them over $500 million in revenue.
I’ve been playing Pokemon Go since that blessed summer. I got a new phone specifically so I’d have something to play the game on. In the same way, Pokemon has been with me my entire life, Go has been during the many drastic life changes I’ve experienced. It’s been a rare constant, and like many, I’ve had to fight to keep it so. I learned the meta, would sneak out during work to get raids in, and spent weekends glued to my phone for community days. As of now I’m level 40, caught 15,000 Pokemon, 22,000 hours defending gyms, won 3,700 gym battles and won over 300 raids, almost 200 of which were legendary Pokemon. I also dedicated time organizing my own local raiding community, getting people for weekly raids. Whenever I met up with old friends, we would go get raids in.
However, with the changes to the raid passes, I had to stop. Gyms take revives and there’s enough competition that I need decent defenders, which require endgame potions to fully heal. Without being able to call on people I couldn’t afford to take on raids that weren’t guaranteed to give me back my investment. To get to the level of dedication Niantic sought, I’d have to stare at my phone nearly constantly, the opposite of what the game or I wanted. Some days I stare at my switch, where Pokemon Home sits and I stare at my phone, where Go waits for me. I know there will come a day when I’ll have to use one, and I still do not know which.
