Key Takeaways
- Pokemon TCG Pocket is very good at what it does. It’s fun, if you aren’t already a TCG player, and it is great at manufacturing dopamine.
- But the game’s monetisation is pretty predatory, to the extent that I’d say it’s a gacha game. It intentionally floods you with currency and cards then cuts you off, incentivising you to spend money to keep the cards flowing.
- Considering that Pokemon is very targeted towards kids and exploits nasty tactics to get people to spend money, this feels pretty unethical. We shouldn’t be letting the company get away with it just because it’s Pokemon.
I keep seeing people talk about Pokemon TCG Pocket, so I downloaded Pokemon TCG Pocket. I don’t particularly care for Pokemon, nor do I collect trading cards or have any strong interest in TCGs – I’m just very susceptible to FOMO. I downloaded it a couple of hours ago, and already it’s sucked up more of my work day than I’m comfortable admitting.
I’m justifying this to myself by saying I was doing research for this article. That’s fair, right? Right?!
In fact, I think I’m enjoying it too much, considering the number of red flags that have jumped out at me in the time I’ve been playing it. There’s something very, very wrong with this game.
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Pokemon TCG Pocket Is Very Fun
TCG Pocket is very good at what it aims to do. At its core, you’re opening booster packs, collecting cards to fill up your Pokedex, building decks with what you’ve collected, and battling against either AI opponents or other players. As my colleague Ben Sledge wrote when the game launched, pulling cards feels great. The whole thing is very tactile – you swipe to open decks, flip through the cards inside, and swipe up to add them to your Pokedex. You can move cards around to admire their beautiful, shifting art.
The battling gameplay is replicated as well as it could be, considering it’s a pretty simple game to pick up and play. It’s really the battles that got me – while I’m not currently into TCGs, I am around the age of 30, which means that as a kid, I played my fair share of Pokemon TCG against my cousin. Unfortunately, the battles feel just the same, which means I was hooked the moment that mechanic unlocked.
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But At Its Core, It’s Just A Gacha Game
You know how the whole industry knows that gacha games are predatory, using tactics known to hook players and leave them high and dry so they’re more inclined to spend money trying to replicate the dopamine rush of those first microtransactions? That’s what Pokemon TCG Pocket does. Ben also wrote in the article linked above about how the game is absolutely swamped with currencies and timers.
In fact, there are so many currencies that I still don’t know what all of them do. I’ll see an unfamiliar icon and not have a clue what I’m spending. There’s one for every kind of thing you might want to purchase, and then one that you buy with real money to bypass the whole rigmarole and open more packs. If you’re lucky, you might even open a God Pack, which guarantees five ultra rare or higher cards, but you’d have to be really lucky – there’s only a 0.05 percent likelihood of you finding one.
If that sounds familiar, that’s because you’ve seen it in every gacha game ever. And it’s working just as intended – the game earned $12 million in its first four days. It floods you with currencies, lets you grind for a few days, then cuts you off and leaves you basically nothing to do.
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Who’s Most Vulnerable To Gacha Monetisation?
What makes this worse is that kids love Pokemon, and they love when you have games on your phone. Of course kids are going to be playing this. Instead of giving children a simple, tutorialised pathway into the hobby, it’s getting them hooked on gambling. That’s not very family-friendly of you, Pokemon Company.
We’ve seen other companies being held accountable for marketing microtransactions to children – the Association for UK Interactive Entertainment released new guidelines around loot boxes in video games last year, the FTC made Epic Games pay hundreds of millions in refunds to consumers for misleading in-app purchase costs, and loot boxes are banned or otherwise strictly regulated in several countries.
But, you know, it’s Pokemon. We all love Pokemon, and the company responsible for something so precious to us can’t be bad, right? Pokemon Go isn’t monetised as viciously as it could be, so they deserve some credit, right? Except Pokemon TCG Pocket’s monetisation is, arguably, much worse. The Pokemon Company shouldn’t be given a free pass just because collecting cards makes us happy.
Experience the fun of collecting Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG) cards with Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, an upcoming game for iOS and Android devices from Creatures Inc., the original developers of the Pokémon TCG, and DeNA Co., Ltd.
In this game, you will be able to open two booster packs every day at no cost. You can collect digital cards featuring nostalgic artwork from the past as well as brand-new cards that are exclusive to Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket.
Be on the lookout for new “immersive cards,” which will make you feel as though you’ve leapt into the world of the card’s illustration.