A couple of years ago, when I was playing Pokemon Go daily, I showed up to a raid with my son. I started chatting with some of the other people there and one guy mentioned that his monthly budget for the game was $100. Another guy chimed in to concur. It was kind of eye opening. I had been wondering how the game could be free, and it was at that moment that I realized that the game was mostly paid for by hard core players who were spending to level up faster and get rarer Pokemon (through buying incubators for eggs and such).
Pokemon Go doesn't really have a gambling aspect to it though, so I can't fault it in that area, nor am I really sure their model is a problem - since the people spending the money are choosing to do so for their own entertainment. It does feel a bit odd though, and ultimately it did hurt the experience of the game (since you do better if you pay more).
I argue it has a hidden gambling aspect with raids. Most of the desirable pokemon comes from raids, and of course you want desirable stats. There are about 3 levels of gambling here that get people hooked in:
1. Catching the pokemon at all. There is only a probability with each throw that the ball catches the pokemon
2. Getting good stats. It's easy to get mediocre stats from the raid pokemon, which are randomly generated and not known unitl catch time.
3. Getting a shiny. It's something like a 5% chance from a raid that the pokemon will be shiny. And of course you don't know until after you spend your raid pass.
Niantic gives you only 1 free raid pass a day, so in order to get more chances at shinies and good stat pokemon you need to spend money.
These are really good points, I'd forgotten about the shinnies and the stats. I was always less concerned with stats because I would usually get one that was good enough. However, I knew people that had to get the latest shiny when it came out. Some of the shinnies would only appear in eggs too, so you would need to hatch a lot to have a good chance of getting one. Thinking about it more, the game definitely does seem to have some hidden gambling aspects in it.
I don't know WHAT people are spending on since the core loop of the game isn't monetized, nor is there any stamina system that locks people out of the core loop like many other japanese mobile games. But they have a lotta people spending a lot of something.
Honestly a bit surprised that I haven't heard of some non-Niantic titles trying to compete. I know part of it is purely on the pokemon brand, but there clearly must be some slice of the market to cater to outside of that.
Incubators to hatch eggs, Passes to do more than 2 raids a day, extra storage for pokemon and items, different clothes for your character. All of those can be purchased with in-game money, but they also have special cash only events.
I paid $100 4 years ago, that I still haven't used up. Though I can see how someone could go overboard with it.
It does, but the US median annual wage was $34,248.45 in 2021 (mean average was 54k but that's skewed by high income people). Spending $100 out of a monthly income of $2800 isn't unreasonable for a lot of people.
I worked on Pokemon GO until a bit after launch. One of the things I liked about the game was there wasn’t really a way to “whale out” and that the company made most of their money from a wide group of players paying a few dollars rather than the typical Zynga-style whale game.
Pokemon Go doesn't really have a gambling aspect to it though, so I can't fault it in that area, nor am I really sure their model is a problem - since the people spending the money are choosing to do so for their own entertainment. It does feel a bit odd though, and ultimately it did hurt the experience of the game (since you do better if you pay more).