February 03, 2025 by RSS Feed
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I remember first getting a Game Boy and a copy of Pokemon Red, choosing Charmander, and struggling through the first two gyms with a pig-headed stubbornness to never switch him out. I played the main series, and all the side games like Snap, Puzzle League, and Rescue Squad.
Even with the Switch generation missing the mark for me, I still love the series. So seeing the direction Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket is going is infuriating. I complain about it a lot, but not because it’s bad, or because it's the “cool” thing to write about, or because I hate it. I do it because the developers are taking a huge part of my childhood and letting greed corrupt it.
Physical TCGs can be ruinously expensive, especially with set rotations. Even then, I have never seen any of them take an expansion and split it into three sets as Pocket did on launch. Two free packs a day may sound generous, but when you take into account the number of cards that have a nearly 1% drop, you’d have to be a free-to-player user for a lifetime to collect everything. I thought this was being remedied when they went to one set for Mystical Island, but now they have gone backwards in Space-Time Smackdown and split it again.
And then they released that damn Trade function. The fact you need Trade Tokens, which can currently only be gained by discarding higher rarity cards, is insulting. Especially because you need to burn multiple cards before you can afford to even trade one. And that’s not even mentioning that there are restricted cards in each set and that you can’t even trade a single card from Space-Time Smackdown.
It is clear what the goal of Pokemon Pocket is; make as much money from the players for every possible thing. Free-to-play users are never going to pull enough on the two free packs to be able to reliably use this feature. It is insulting and exclusionary. The developers did release a statement saying these restrictions were to deter bots and multiple accounts, but is anyone buying that? The line where they claim their goal was to “maintain a fair environment for all players” is particularly laughable. They are “investigating ways to improve the feature”, but I am not holding my breath.
I sincerely believe that in its current state, the developers clearly don’t value all of its player base. They only value those who can afford to buy countless packs to get those rare cards or build those meta decks. I don’t buy for a second that they were trying to prevent botting, they just wanted more money in their pockets from even more users pulling for those Golden Legendaries.
I hate that every time there is an announcement or an update from Pocket, I am just waiting for that sucker punch. This should be something I love, but I have played multiple gacha games in my life and no one of them has been even half as greedy as this. And those are games in which you need to pull a single character multiple times. Hopefully, the backlash to the trading feature is going to be a wake up call, but I have a horrible pit in my stomach telling me nothing will change here. At least it will give me something to keep writing about.
Source link:https://www.148apps.com/news/how-pokemon-trading-card-pocket-is-placing-profit-over-players/
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