Pokà©mon GO Seems Set On Ruining Every Improvement From The Pandemic
-
Loading... - Genevieve Allard
- 24 Jun 2022
- 165 Views
- 0 Like
- 0 Comment
Of all the many excellent changes Niantic made to Pokémon GO in the face of the global Covid-19 pandemic, remote raiding seemed to be the one that was most likely to survive long-term. So of course, every new move the developer makes seems to be threatening its future.
Time was, when you wanted to take part in a raid in Pokémon GO, you would have to gather with other real-life players and all stand within just a few meters of the imaginary gym. For a five-star raid, meaning the most powerful–often legendary–Pokémon, you’d need at least five or six people working together to successfully battle it down. When the game was new, and gyms were few, this was actually possible.
Come the pandemic, and the complete impossibility of such actions for much of the world, Niantic introduced the Remote Raid Pass. This allowed you to participate in a raid from any distance, teaming up with friends from anywhere in the world, to tackle the Pokémon. Or you could even just click on a relatively nearby raid and remotely fight it yourself.
Quickly, canny people recognized an opportunity here, and created various apps to allow complete strangers around the world to team up to tackle specific raids. All it takes is one local person to host, then apps like PokeRaid and Poke Genie will automatically assign players into teams. All befriend one another with codes shared via the apps, and then the host invites everyone to the raid.
Now, if that were it, you could maybe see how Niantic might get miffed that third-party app makers were making money instead of them. (Although I strongly recommend Poke Genie over the more popular PokeRaid—it never asks for a penny.) However, Niantic also charges for the required Remote Raid Passes, meaning the more people are encouraged to take part in such raids, the more they’re likely to be spending in the game to do so. And, rather importantly, Niantic made no moves at all to create its own version of similar technology.
Remote raiding just makes far more sense, everyone loves it, and Niantic gained a new in-app revenue stream. It couldn’t have worked out better, right? Well, of course we can’t have nice things, and Niantic is now making moves that look set to threaten this new normal.
The first concerning sign was the simultaneous removal of a weekly 1-coin Remote Raid Pass, that was previously given to all players on a Monday. Then, at the same time, it increased the price three Remote Raid Passes in the in-game store from 250 PokéCoins to 300. (Individual passes remain at 100 coins, or $0.99, each.) That felt like a spectacularly dick move, timing-wise. (That said, the weekly 1-coin boxes remain available, and offer some genuinely good bundles of differing in-game items.)
Then Niantic made a new announcement regarding June’s Community Day, that managed to rub salt in two wounds at once. Players are already rightly pissed off at the inexplicable (and never rationalized) decision to halve the length of Community Days from six to three hours, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. only. Now, Niantic’s announced another “new” feature: Players will be able to “extend” the day past 2 p.m. by taking part in a new type of gym raid. They’re “new” in the sense that you can only take part in them if you’re physically at the raid location. Yes indeed, you can have the longer Community Day you wanted, but only if you take part in a really obvious move to make remote raiding feel less reliable.
Eurogamer spoke to Niantic about this, to ask if this was the beginning of the end of remote raiding, and was told, “We’ve no intention right now of removing remote raiding for the regular tiers of raiding…But we haven’t been shy about the fact we’re looking at opportunities for players to get playing in person again.”
That “right now” reads so very ominously to me, especially given the extended couching in the rest of that reply. And, as you’d expect, we got the “get playing in person again” line yet again.
We reached out to Niantic to press further on this, but after waiting a day we haven’t received a response.
Here’s what’s wrong with their “get playing in person” line: It doesn’t work. Sure, if you’re in a major city, taking part in a major event, you’ve got a chance of stumbling upon the six or seven other people you’d need to take down a Mewtwo raid right now. But for absolutely everyone else in the whole world? No! It’s not a thing. Unless you’re lucky enough to have at least five other friends who are still playing the game, and are all astonishingly free at the same time, and then all able to gather in the same place at that time, how is anyone supposed to be raiding by “playing in person again”? Read More...
