by Kati Alha, Elina Koskinen, Dale Leorke, & Elisa Wiik
First published April 2023.
Download full article PDF here (TBC).
Abstract
In this article we unpack responses (n = 1,741) by Finnish Pokémon GO players to an open-ended survey question “how has your experience of the game changed throughout the time you’ve played it?” The survey, conducted in 2019, provides insights into players’ attitudes towards Pokémon GO’s evolution in the first three years since its release. We analysed the data using thematic coding, producing 61 codes grouped under eight broad categories: content, way of playing, significance, nature of the game, social aspects, perceptions, demands and context. Our findings highlight players’ reaction to changing demands from the game as it incorporates new content, becomes more social and its player base solidifies, producing a complex and sometimes contested affective relationship with the game and the wider community of players. In the era of service-based game development where game companies struggle to keep their games engaging and profitable years after launch, our study offers a broad and diverse view into post-launch changes from the perspective of the players.
Keywords: Free-to-play games, games-as-a-service, location-based games, player studies, Pokémon GO.
Introduction
When it launched in July 2016, Pokémon GO became a global phenomenon, visibly changing the streets, parks and public spaces of cities and towns around the world. Previous location-based games had attracted some attention, including early experimental subscription-based mobile games such as Botfighters (It’s Alive!, 2001) and Mogi, Item Hunt (Newt Games, 2003) and, later, smartphone apps with built-in microtransactions like Parallel Kingdom: Age of Ascension (PerBlue Entertainment, 2008), Shadow Cities (Grey Area, 2011) and Ingress (Niantic, 2012) (Leorke, 2018). But Pokémon GO drew on the Pokémon franchise’s brand recognition and developer Niantic’s approachable design to bring location-based mobile gaming into the mainstream like no other game before, making this previously niche type of gaming a household name. Players from every generation and background – including some who had never played a mobile game before (Koskinen et al., 2019) – participated in a global craze that for weeks dominated news headlines and everyday conversation.
But it was barely a few months into Pokémon GO’s release that discussion turned to reports about its declining player base and predictions that other location-based game franchises would soon surpass the game in terms of players and popularity (e.g. Boyle, 2016; Humphery-Jenner, 2016). Indeed, since its release numerous developers, including Niantic itself, have attempted to capture Pokémon GO’s player base by fusing location-based game design with popular film, television and video game franchises, such as Harry Potter, Jurassic World, The Walking Dead, Minecraft and The Witcher. Yet, at the time of writing, Pokémon GO continues to vastly surpass the revenue and player base of other location-based games, years after its release. While Pokémon GO’s estimated number of active players have dropped to under a third of its first-year peak by 2021, its active player base still exceeds 70 million players and its revenue continues to rise (Business of Apps, 2021). It also remains the subject of strong scholarly interest, with countless publications dedicated to examining its social and cultural impact and the potential benefits for players’ physical and mental health, and general wellbeing (Richardson et al., 2020). There is now a wealth of interview and survey data about player experiences of the game, making it one of the most studied games to date. Despite this extensive research, however, little research exists on how Pokémon GO players’ experiences of, and attitudes to, the game have changed over time.
In this article, we address this gap by analysing data from an online survey of Finnish Pokémon GO players conducted in October 2019, three years after the game’s release. As a mobile, free-to-play game, Pokémon GO has the same challenges as other games in this competitive marketplace. After breaking through, these games need to keep evolving to retain their existing players by engaging and re-engaging them, while simultaneously attracting new audiences. Therefore, examining how Pokémon GO and the experiences with it have changed during the first years after the launch is vital to not only understand Pokémon GO better, but also to understand the post-launch development choices of service-based games in general and their effects.
This article focuses specifically on respondents’ answers to the open-ended question “how has your experience of the game changed throughout the time you’ve played it?” (n = 1,741). Using thematic coding to identify key phrases and terms that players used to describe Pokémon GO’s evolution over its first three years, we examine participants’ motivations for play and their attitudes towards its changing mechanics, features and wider context of play. This produced 61 codes that we grouped into eight categories: content, way of playing, significance, nature of the game, social aspects, perceptions, demands and context. In unpacking this analysis, we see a broad, diverse experience spectrum at a time when the game had evolved substantially and become more social. At the same time, the original hype had faded, and the game had become a more mundane part of the players’ lives. Simultaneously, the game had become more demanding towards players as it provided an increasing amount of content, goals, and motivations to pay for in-game content.
A Brief History of Pokémon GO
When Pokémon GO launched in July 2016, despite its enormous uptake and almost unavoidable presence in many public spaces around the world, one of the biggest criticisms it attracted concerned its lack of features and content. An early trailer for the game depicted realistic Pokémon animations and large-scale group battles at New York’s Times Square (Official Pokémon YouTube Channel, 2015). But at launch, trading and battling with other players – core features of the videogame and anime series – were absent. Only the first 150 Pokémon from the original Game Boy game were available to catch, and through the much-anticipated AR feature, Pokémon were largely static, superimposed on flat surfaces rather than blending in realistically with their surroundings (see Klepek, 2016). However, as Table 1 shows, these features and many others have been incrementally added over time: beginning with the “Buddy” interaction and cooperative raid features within one year of release, followed, most notably, by trading and one-on-one battles in 2018. Also, since 2018, Niantic have run monthly “Community Days”, featuring a specific Pokémon that appears more frequently over a weekend and learns an exclusive move when evolved during the event. These Community Days are mostly in-game, but as their name suggests they aim to get players gathering and meeting in public in pursuit of rare Pokémon. Meanwhile, new generations from the video game series have been added at a rate of approximately one per year, bringing with them dozens of new Pokémon to catch and evolve.
Since 2019, numerous other features and changes have been made to the game. Most notably, the AR features have been enhanced: the “Buddy Adventure” mode enables players to interact and build a relationship with a buddy Pokémon, and an AR mapping feature rewards players for scanning PokéStops and Gyms with their phone’s camera. Like other location-based games, Pokémon GO has also adapted to the Covid-19 pandemic by increasing the distance for interacting with PokéStops and providing items that allow players to spawn and raid Pokémon from their home. Niantic made the changes to the distance required for interaction with PokeStops permanent in 2021 after a player backlash against its removal (Good, 2021). While these changes and features occurred after our survey was conducted, they illustrate the continually evolving nature of the game, with many key features substantially expanding and altering the gameplay experience. In this sense, Pokémon GO embodies the games-as-a-service model, continually adding new content and features to create ever-shifting goals and incentives for players to continue playing. As Aphra Kerr (2017, p. 177) writes, this model creates a kind of “contested dependency,” where “monitoring and supporting circulation [becomes] as important to success as initial production. Identifying paying players is as crucial to content creation” for companies like Niantic, which must retain a core of paying players to sustain the game’s profitability.
Pokémon GO’s player base has ebbed and waned since its release, and numerous developers have sought to emulate both its commercial success and popularity. Some of these games take the form of Pokémon GO “clones”, imitating the game’s mechanics and interface but substituting Nintendo’s copyrighted creatures with alternatives, such as dragons or mythological creatures (e.g. Draconius GO (Elyland LLC, 2017) and Let’s Hunt Monsters (Tencent Games, 2019)). Other games, such as Jurassic World Alive (Ludia, 2018), The Walking Dead: Our World (Next Games, 2018) and Niantic’s own Harry Potter: Wizards Unite (2019) and Pikmin Bloom (2021), have combined popular franchises with location-based game mechanics like Pokémon GO, but have had their own unique mechanics and approaches.
Despite the plethora of clones, imitations and adaptations, Pokémon GO seemingly continues to outpace all other location-based games in pure revenue. Analyst Sensor Tower estimates that it more than quadrupled the revenue of its nearest competitor, Dragon Quest Walk (COLOPL, 2019), in 2019, followed by Let’s Hunt Monsters in third place (Sensor Tower, 2020a).[1] It fared even better in 2020, with its estimated revenue reaching US$1b before the year’s end, for a total of US$4b since its release; Covid-19 restrictions only boosted rather than reduced player activity and spending (Sensor Tower, 2020b). Of course, it is difficult to gauge the popularity and impact of a game based on numbers, but they attest to Pokémon GO’s enduring success several years after global hype has faded – especially compared with other location-based games, which often struggle to retain players, make only modest profits and disappear within a few years of release (see Leorke, 2018).
Our Methods
Pokémon GO’s ongoing popularity was also reflected in the survey of Finnish players we conducted in 2019. The survey was available online between September 27th – October 14th, 2019 and received 2,880 valid responses, surpassing the respondent count in a survey we conducted in 2016 (Alha et al. 2019). Both our surveys were in Finnish and advertised on Finnish Pokémon GO discussion forums, meaning they captured dedicated, active players and are not representative of the wider population of players.[2] Nonetheless, the sheer number of respondents we attracted in a short period of time for the 2019 survey, in a country of less than 6 million people, underscores Pokémon GO’s persistently strong player base.
The 2019 survey asked over 30 questions focusing on respondents’ motivations, locations played, their experiences with the game’s features and mechanics, social interaction and their previous gaming and Pokémon experiences. With eight open-ended questions that received a substantial number of responses each, it is not possible to analyse the entire dataset in one article. As such, this article focuses specifically on responses to the open-ended question “how has your experience of the game changed throughout the time you’ve played it?” It was optional and received 1,741 valid responses.[3] The responses were typically short, ranging from a short sentence to a few sentences, and respondents sometimes described several changes in one answer. Table 2 shows the gender and age distribution of our sample, as well as whether the respondents had spent any money on the game.
The responses were analysed by three of the authors. The approach was exploratory and used applied thematic analysis (Guest et al., 2012). The process started with each of the three researchers familiarising themselves with the data, each creating a separate codebook by analysing and coding the same section of the data (n = 100). At this point, they convened to compare the codes and codebooks, forming a unified codebook. The data was shared between the authors so that each section was coded by a single author, with several points where any new codes, changes in the codebook, and uncertainties were discussed, and the codebook updated. Halfway through the coding process, the authors chose again a new shared section of the data (n = 100), which each of them then coded. After this, the codes were compared, and any differences were discussed and resolved. This improved the reliability of the coding and unified its understanding by the researchers. As the researchers managed to code the shared section relatively similarly and resolve any differences, they felt confident in coding the majority of the data separately. After the coding process was completed, each researcher went through their codes to make sure they were updated to reflect any additions and changes in the codebook during the process. This process produced 61 codes, that were then combined into eight categories. Additionally, six general codes were used to mark answers that mentioned the experience changing substantially, not at all, to the better, to the worse, that it had varied, or that the general interest had changed, but did not explain what in the experience had changed. These codes and responses were noted but not used in further analysis. In the next section we outline the categories by discussing the codes and using examples.
Results
In this section, we analyse the results through the categories, discussing the types of responses under each category. Table 3 below provides an overview of the categories and each of the codes we assigned to them. Throughout the paper, we italicise both categories and individual codes to more efficiently summarise and discuss our findings.
Content
It is not surprising that content was the largest category in our data. As seen in our overview of key changes in the game (see Table 1), several major changes had happened during the first three years after the release, and this was reflected in the data. Many of the new or changed features were mentioned by name: events, raids, friends, gyms, trading, research tasks, Team Rocket, battle, gifts, AR and teams.
The game has changed a lot from its early days. New features have been added, and progression in the game is considerably faster. Cooperating with players seems to increase constantly. Exchanging gifts with friends ties you into the game as well. (Woman, 55)
It is worth mentioning that some of the game content changes happened in the in-game environment, such as having new PokéStops or Pokémon spawn points located in the respondent’s surroundings. One of the main criticisms of Pokémon GO (as well as some other location-based games) has been the uneven possibilities to play in the countryside or other sparsely populated areas due to the lack of content. According to the data, this was somewhat remedied with updates, even though the problem persisted:
I think the game has been improving constantly as plenty of new gyms and stops have been added. Something new is happening all the time. On the other hand, recently my own game experience has suffered because I moved from a suburb to the countryside, and playing in the countryside is more challenging because there are no nearby Pokémon and the stops/gyms are quite scarce. (woman, 28)
Often the new content was a positive change, but it had its downsides as well. Not everyone always liked when the game added or changed its features, while some expressed longing for the original game before the additions. Especially keeping up with the new content might become increasingly difficult, as seen under the category demands.
Way of playing
As many of the respondents had played the game for a longer while, their way of playing had been impacted. These answers describe changes in how players approached and played the game and how it impacted on their experience. Players had learned more about Pokémon and their characteristics, different aspects of the game and how to play it effectively, and sometimes had started to play the game in a more strategic or goal-oriented manner than before:
A lot has been learned while playing, and tactics have become a part of the game. When to open gifts to get the seven kilometre egg, which berry is the best to shove to a Pokémon’s face while catching, etc. (woman, 37)
The respondents further described achieving goals, for instance reaching the current maximum level of the game. This could affect the experience in several ways. Some had changed their goals, and had to, for instance, find new goals or invent goals of their own. Others had given up the goal of catching every Pokémon, as this felt unachievable given the constant addition of content. Even the general reason behind playing had changed for some respondents. One example is a respondent who started to play the game for its own sake but became more invested because of the relationships formed through playing.
These responses show that ways of playing can be in a constant flux, evolving over time, and that the game can be played for different reasons and in different ways by the same player in different phases of the playing career.
Significance
Pokémon GO’s evolution is also present in the significance of the game as the respondents described changes in their activeness and commitment to the game and its importance to them. It is interesting to note two overarching experiences with these aspects of the game. More commonly, the player had become less active or less committed. When they first began playing the game it was more intense, and respondents described going for longer walks just to catch Pokémon, taking the game more seriously or being more passionate about it; but over time this commitment had waned. In some cases, playing had become a mundane routine or merely something to do on the side while, for instance, walking to work or while playing other location-based games:
During the first summer I could go out specifically for Pokémon hunts, but after that the excitement faded and I don’t feel like going outside specifically because of the game other than for occasional raiding and on community days, if I don’t have other plans. (woman, 54)
On the other hand, some played more casually in the beginning, and over time their commitment had grown, and they had become more invested, or the game had grown to be an important part of the respondent’s life. One reason for this is finding a community around the game:
I have “started to play for real” only around six months ago after joining a FB group and learned to understand the game, before this I was mostly just catching the pokemon I saw. Playing has become more intense and more interesting. (man, 22)
No matter how the significance of the playing had changed, the answers describe how the game finds its place in the player’s life, and how that space changes and shifts across time, for various reasons.
Nature of the game
The descriptions of the overall feel of the game changing were categorised under the nature of the game. Pokémon GO had included more content in the form of new features and new ways of playing the game and this was reflected in the responses of the game being more diverse than before. At the time of the survey, Pokémon GO was providing a wider range of content and activities to do than was available in its beginning. Simultaneously, the addition of new activities made the game more complex or confusing. On the other hand, even with the additions, some felt that over time the experience had become repetitive:
Of course, improving your own creatures and finding better ones make raiding and gym activity easier. But obviously, repeating the same all the time isn’t very meaningful, so my eagerness to play and gym activity fade, too. (man, 40)
In addition, both progression and challenge had changed, but again there were two main perspectives. One highlighted that progression had become more difficult as the player advanced in the game, for example reaching higher levels or filling their Pokédex. A second perspective, conversely, found that progression was much easier as the game had made gaining experience points faster. In a few cases, respondents described this as “unfair”, because unlike new players, they had had to work harder to gain levels. Some suggested that the game had become too easy as a result. This highlights a belief that progress is something “earned” with hard work:
Playing is still nice, but leveling up and gathering XP has become immensely easier. That’s why it’s a bit “unfair” that those who just started playing can level up very quickly. (woman, 42)
Other interesting, albeit relatively rare, mentions are related to the monetisation aspects of the game. These respondents blame the developer for being or becoming greedy, or felt they were being pressured to pay. This is connected to the free-to-play model of the game, where typically monetisation becomes more aggressive over time.
Social Aspects
According to the responses, the sociality of Pokémon GO had mostly increased in time. New features, especially raids, had made the experience more communal. Raids typically require a group of players to join to defeat powerful Pokémon. Some rare, powerful Pokémon can only be caught this way and can require groups of up to 20 players to have a chance of defeating them, making a solo approach difficult, if not impossible. These features also created pressure to play with other people, which is discussed under demands.
Those that had previously played only by themselves found out that playing together with friends, spouses, their children, and other players had made the experience better. For some, spending time with their loved ones was more important than the game itself. Others had lost or gained co-players, when their children, spouses or existing friends had either quit or started playing the game, affecting their experience as well, while others had met new people, even made friends through it, for instance when taking part in raids and community days:
Communality has increased – I know the players in the neighbourhood but not the person next door, for example. (woman, 45)
Some respondents had joined a wider community online, offline or both. These included raid groups and groups dedicated to specific Pokémon GO teams that organised their activities and discussed the game via social media or messaging platforms. These smaller communities were mostly seen as positive aspects that made the game experience more social and motivated the respondents to play more. A lot could depend on the activity of the community, as described in the quote below, which also touches on the demands the social features bring:
At first, I didn’t get into any of the local groups for a long time, so attending legendary raids was purely a matter of chance and usually didn’t work out. When I got into a whatsapp group, I got excited about playing in a whole new way and enjoyed the communality. Then I moved to another town and again it took just under a year before I got into the local whatsapp group. During that time, I didn’t have a whole lot of enthusiasm for playing. Now that I have gotten into the group, I’m more enthusiastic about playing again, although the group is pretty quiet. I wish the lack of friends to play with would not affect the game this much. (woman, 27)
Perceptions
The player’s perception about the game often changes over time. Some of the respondents had been very excited about the game initially, but its novelty faded as they kept playing. The excitement around it had evaporated, so the game became perceived as boring and the players lost interest. This realisation was sometimes connected to the game becoming repetitive, mundane or a burden for these players, or the game having too much monetisation, poor functionality and less interesting content.
Sometimes what had changed was the impression the players had of the game. Respondents that previously had negative attitudes towards the game had been positively surprised and found out that the game was more diverse, fun or engaging than they had first thought. A few respondents reported a more negative shift: that the game now felt childish, poorly designed or shallow. A few respondents discussed feelings of nostalgia. While in previous research nostalgia had been an important part in starting to play the game, its importance had dropped for those continuing playing (Alha et al., 2019). Some respondents in this study mentioned that the nostalgia they felt towards Pokémon had vanished in time as they continued to play the game, or when newer Pokémon generations were added that were unfamiliar to them.
Players had also changed perceptions of themselves. Some of the respondents felt that they had become more patient or brave while playing the game. These respondents had become more tolerant of the flaws of the game such as bugs and they had more patience towards some aspects of the gameplay, such as catching certain Pokémon or the slow progress through higher levels. Bravery was needed when approaching other players, participating in raids, and overcoming the shame of playing in the public as an adult:
Having never really played any communal game, I found it difficult in the beginning to visit gyms or do anything else that required a community. Nevertheless, I’ve got the hang of it and even though I still wouldn’t participate in a Pokémon boat cruise, it no longer feels difficult to participate in raids etc. (unspecified, 37)
Demands
The category of demands encompasses how playing Pokémon GO required effort and time and how the respondents reacted to this. As the game had a lot of new content and continuous events, keeping up with the game had become increasingly challenging. Some of the respondents described a fear of missing out when they were not able to participate in the events. As the demands piled up, some even described how the game had become a burden for them: playing felt like work, was laborious or involved constant grinding.
A lot of daily features have been added to the game that are hard to keep up with even during the most enthusiastic Pokémon Go times in the summer and in good weather: in the beginning it was easier to put the game down since especially when sitting still or at home you couldn’t play the game reasonably any more, but you didn’t “miss” anything either if you didn’t play daily. (woman, 29)
As the game had become more social, some felt that these changes had led to forced socialisation. In particular, the implementation of raid battles locked content behind social activity, while some of the research tasks required the player to add more in-game friends or battle other players. Respondents who were used to playing alone felt pressure to connect to other players or settle for not having the possibility to collect all the Pokémon and rewards in the game.
Before you could play anonymously behind a nickname, nowadays you need to take part in the community if you are planning to catch them all. Depending on the day, this is either annoying or rewarding… (man, 34)
The forced socialisation could end up causing positive experiences even if it felt annoying or anxiety-inducing at first. This was then connected to learning more about oneself and feeling braver and empowered by overcoming oneself, as mentioned under perceptions.
Context
The context category includes codes related to changes in the broader factors around the game experience, such as other players or possibilities to play the game. While the respondents had noticed the composition of the audience changing, for instance the average age increasing and the number of players decreasing, the behaviour of other players had changed as well. These responses described how others were becoming more inconsiderate or cheating by using multiple accounts, amongst other means. Conflicts had also erupted between players and teams, and players had formed “cliques” unwilling to help other players:
I still think it’s a good game, but the communality that I felt in the beginning and during the first years has vanished. The players come to raids, staying in their cars, further away. In the beginning we always thanked each other for the help, and chatted more about everything. Now there’s hardly any talking. (woman, 66)
On the other hand, some players noted that the conflicts had reduced and players were more considerate and helpful than before, indicating that the experiences differed between groups and communities. However, the fading hype around Pokémon GO was more universal, and had affected the general playing atmosphere:
Nowadays the game is stable, but sometimes I miss the first pokemon summer when every place was full of enthusiastic players and the spirit of community exuded from the people. (non-binary person, 21)
Sometimes there were changes in the physical environment of the respondent. This often involved moving to a new place, which meant changes in the playable content available to them and the people to play with:
I mostly play alone, and nowadays live in a small town where you can find gyms and legendary raids, yet my progression in the game has slowed down remarkably since I moved from [a bigger city] to a small city a year ago. […] In the early days of the game as a lone player I had the same opportunities to get all the Pokémon as anyone else, now I feel that because of where I live […] I am in an unequal position (raids with many people, regionals and trading them). (woman, 32)
If the respondent reported playing other games, this had affected the respondents’ Pokémon GO playing by detracting time from it. Harry Potter: Wizards Unite and Ingress, both location-based games by Niantic, were the most often mentioned examples. Playing several location-based games actively at the same time proved to be challenging. Upgrading or changing equipment also affected the game experience, for example acquiring a new phone or the Pokémon GO Plus or Gotcha peripheral, which made playing possible in different conditions or in different ways.
Discussion
Our findings reveal a complex and often ambiguous relationship between players and Pokémon GO, three years after its release. In particular, we want to draw attention to three perspectives on how the game’s evolution has affected the player population’s experiences and created tensions both for players and its developers. Firstly, the expanded, accumulating content, frequent events, and new goals and ways to play the game enable the continuous engagement of active players, while also making it more complex and confusing, creating demands to keep up with the content, and possibly pressuring players into spending money. Secondly, the social features and requirements for players to play together to reach all goals has increased the communal feel, while also creating opposition and social anxiety as the chance of random encounters has decreased. Finally, the findings highlight how the free-to-play model of games like Pokémon GO itself manages to sustain itself years after the release and satisfy and retain players.
Cumulative content and exhaustion
In its first years, Pokémon GO went through many substantial changes. It is typical for games in the games-as-a-service model to add more playable content on top of the core gameplay to serve, retain and monetise their users (Clark, 2014). Therefore, Pokémon GO needs to keep offering new content to active players, who would otherwise complete the game’s initial goals. However, Niantic’s additions have been especially ambitious, so that after three years in development, the respondents sometimes described it as being a completely different game. During the first years after its launch, Pokémon GO had added new generations of Pokémon, implemented completely new mechanics while refining existing ones, and incorporated timed events and challenges. While the core gameplay – catching Pokémon from the player’s surroundings – is still there, substantial new ways to catch and interact with Pokémon have been added, and the in-game social dimensions have been transformed. The developer’s attempts at player retention and monetisation are perhaps the most apparent of these changes.
This new content was frequently mentioned in the answers, often in a positive sense. Many considered the game to be better with more diverse and complex gameplay. Progression has been found to be the main reason to continue playing Pokémon GO (Alha et al., 2019), and Niantic has ensured there are multiple ways allowing players to progress, even after reaching the level cap.
The new content has a downside, as well. As the game continues adding content, keeping up with that content might start to feel stressful or demanding. The fear of missing out on any timed events or rewards made a small core of respondents play the game more than they would like, even when it was no longer fun, in some cases causing anxiety or feeling like an addiction. While some respondents reacted to this by taking on a more casual approach to the game and caring less about doing everything the game offered, others kept playing the game even after it had started to feel like a burden or a chore. This was felt especially strongly for players who had invested more time and possibly money on the game where “catching ‘em all” is the ultimate end goal. These sunk costs cause a feeling of wasting earlier investments if players miss something in the game or stop playing it, and are thus more likely to continue investing in the game (Hamari, 2011). This can then lead to fatigue related to constant events, activities and daily tasks, which echoes an earlier player study connected to free-to-play games (Alha et al., 2018).
Our respondents’ experiences demonstrate how, over the duration of their play, for some players Pokémon GO has already shifted from a “casual” to a “full-time” investment. This might be according to Niantic’s strategy. While the game started as a relatively simple game that could be played more casually, by gradually becoming more complex and more demanding it can retain the more committed players who are also more willing to spend money on the game. However, for even more respondents, their feelings related to personal progress with the game was the opposite to the one expected: they started to play with enthusiasm and commitment, and over time this mentality had decreased, playing becoming more of a mundane habit in their daily life. As at the same time the game had become more demanding, this created a point of friction: needing to match the decreased enthusiasm of players with increased demands from the game. However, as the novelty and excitement eventually faded, this ability to overlive its initial hype and become a lower-maintenance hobby or even a mundane routine for the players has been important for the game’s sustainability.
The game becoming a mundane or routine part of players’ lives reflects Richardson et al.’s (2020) case study of Badalona Pokémon GO players. The authors report how, over the course of several years, the game became gradually integrated into citizens’ lives, operating as a conduit for cross-generational interaction and even serving as a lifeline for elderly community members. They further note that “mobile games and apps – and their effects and affects – are most lastingly transformative when they become interwoven with sedimented collective practices.” (Richardson et al., 2020, p. 4). It was after “the Pokémon GO craze became habitualised or forgotten as ‘old’ media” that its wider societal effects became truly apparent (Richardson et al., 2020, p. 4). This notion of Pokémon GO as “old media” is similarly reflected in our respondents’ experiences, with the game receding into the background of their lives and becoming simply a part of their routine. But our research also shows that Pokémon GO is far from just old media, and its ongoing evolution – through new features, updates, changes and content – is met with resistance and disapproval from players as well. In this sense, Pokémon GO is simultaneously and somewhat contradictorily “old media” and a continually changing service platform as it constantly evolves through its many updates and additions.
Collaborative play and social anxiety
This continually evolving nature of the game was most evident in the way it was played socially. When the game was launched, it had relatively few social features. While many played together with others, everything could be achieved by playing alone. As Pokémon GO’s content revolves around actual physical locations (usually landmarks and monuments) it did not need social in-game features at launch. It had enough players so that random encounters happened frequently enough, supporting the emergent sociality (Alha, 2022). As the player population dropped this was no longer possible on the same scale, and the game started to depend more on in-game, even enforced, social features to keep this sociality – which is an important part of a game’s retention (Alha et al., 2018; Alha et al., 2019) and revenue (Hamari et al., 2017) – as a strong part of the game. While the emergent sociality has been seen as a positive and a memorable part of the game (Paavilainen et al., 2017; Alha et al., 2019; Koskinen et al., 2019), the designed in-game social features divide opinions more clearly.
With the new features, some content became only reachable through co-operation, and to play the game efficiently, the player might have needed to join a community around the game and connect with other people. Because the game started without these requirements, “forced” socialisation was met with some resistance. This forced socialisation has been discussed earlier especially in connection with Pokémon GO’s raid feature (Bhattacharya et al., 2019), while the tension between collaborative play and social anxiety in Pokémon GO has been recognised by Kim et al. (2020). In addition to supporting previous findings, our data showed how players who overcame their hesitancy to join others felt empowered by the experience, incrementally becoming “braver” and finding they have the skills and courage to play with others.
It is intriguing that for some respondents, the experience had become less social, even with the new social features. In the first months after the game’s launch, the game was visibly played by a much larger crowd. Therefore, the game enabled random encounters affording greater player sociality. It is likely that Niantic purposefully started the game without social in-game features and even without instructions on how to play the game to encourage players to communicate with each other in a more informal manner. Whether intentional or not, these encounters have been important and memorable for numerous players (Koskinen et al., 2019), and when the hype faded, this type of communality outside the game decreased, while the in-game social features increased a different kind of sociality. The “forced sociality” of these features served to recreate the earlier, spontaneous sociality that eroded as the player base and hype decreased. However, while the sociality in the beginning bound people together through a shared sense of connectedness (see Vella et al., 2017), the later social features could frustrate more solitary players forced to work with others.
This demonstrates that when a game previously depending on emergent sociality adds new social in-game features, there is a need for caution. If such features are added to hide some content exclusively behind player cooperation, especially if collecting is a strong part of the game’s core, it may be received with a mixed response.
Free-to-play model, sustainability and “games-as-a-disservice”
The question behind the evolution of any free-to-play game such as Pokémon GO is its sustainability. The way Pokémon GO has kept adding content and frequent events shows it is serving active daily players who have already played for a longer while, while newcomers or players with more casual play styles might have a harder time fitting into the ever shifting experience. Balancing the game experience between players at different points of the game and with different activity levels is a recognised challenge in games that function as a service (Kerr, 2017). In addition, balancing between paying and non-paying players creates a second challenge, specific for free-to-play games (Alha, 2020). These games need to offer a good enough free experience, while simultaneously offering enough incentives to convert as many players as possible into spending to improve their experience.
Through these tactics, long-lived free-to-play games such as Pokémon GO have a tendency to move away from casual play to cater to the more lucrative, committed audience. While the evolved Pokémon GO was typically described as better than the original version, it may have already lost parts of its more casual audiences. As the responses concerning demands describe a tendency amongst players to get exhausted with the game, will the eventually lost audience mean that Pokémon GO, too, needs to be even more demanding and aggressive in its monetisation to retain its revenue levels from the smaller player base? This is already visible in Pokémon GO in paid event tickets and more challenging and frequent tasks that can be easier to achieve by paying.
Pokémon GO has attracted criticism for its monetisation of players’ labour and data from its beginning (see Ross, 2016), while largely avoiding the more overt “pay-to-win” approaches that many other mobile games have adopted (see Conway, 2012). However, as the player population has decreased, the developers have subtly expanded their attempts to profit from players. They have incorporated a “recommend to a friend” feature and added AR mapping tasks that enlist players as data harvesters (Carter & Egliston, 2020), as well as exclusive Pokémon locked behind 12km eggs that encourage players to spend more money on incubators (Thier, 2020). As Whitson and French (2021) point out, free-to-play games like Pokémon GO that operate on a games-as-a-service model often balance a precarious line between “game and gambling” as they seek to “hook” players over the long term. While Pokémon GO has avoided the most obvious gambling mechanics, its egg and incubator combination effectively function as a loot box model, encouraging players to continually hatch eggs in the hope of the rarer exclusives.
In their attempt to retain and monetise their players, service-based game developers also strike a balance between keeping the game enjoyable and pressuring players to keep playing, even against their own wishes or best interest. The latter kind of “games-as-a-disservice” model can emerge for instance through substituting play with labour (Lehtonen et al., 2022), as noted by some of our respondents, and might not be sustainable in the long run. Lehtonen et al. (2022) point out predatory monetisation as another aspect of disservice. In our data, monetisation was not typically brought up as predatory, but it was noticed as greedier or more aggressive than before, while some respondents mentioned changes in how they spent money on the game. Simultaneously, the number of players who spend money on the game had increased substantially between our surveys, from 37.7% in 2016 (Paavilainen et al., 2017) to 71.2% in 2019. This increase and Pokémon GO’s decreased player base, combined with the increased revenue, further signals how the game’s monetisation has indeed become more aggressive – or more successful, depending on the point of view.
Conclusions
In our study, we investigated how the experience of playing Pokémon GO had changed in 2019, three years after the game’s launch. Our study provides a baseline and a comprehensive set of codes for use in future studies of the game as it continues to adapt, evolve and shift in popularity. Unsurprisingly, our coding delivered several codes relating to new content, but arguably the discoveries of different kinds of changes in meanings and surfacing tensions provide more intriguing observations that may not be captured in a purely quantitative analysis. The amount of labour the game demanded players as well as the conflicting approach towards the social features have elicited the most ambivalent responses. These elements are likely to continue doing so beyond the time of our survey.
These shifts show that Pokémon GO has not been immune to the precarious nature of free-to-play games. While turning off the servers from Pokémon GO might still be years away, the path highlighted in these experiences and the closure of Harry Potter: Wizards Unite’s servers a mere 2.5 years after launch suggests that it, too, has a timeline that might have an end point (Poncharoensub, 2022). What separates Pokémon GO from many other location-based games encountering shutdowns is its vast starting population. Even after losing most of its player base, it remains more than profitable. Finding a stable point on this timeline where it manages to stay and sustain a profitable crowd is still a challenge it faces.
Pokémon GO in 2016 was a different game than when this data was collected in 2019, and, at the time of finalising this article for publication (late 2022), it is different again. Therefore, one study can never completely “capture” its players experiences, but it can provide a snapshot of Pokémon GO’s evolution and how the game was perceived at a specific moment of its development cycle. It is important to capture these experiences close to the time they unfold. This study reflects a particular moment in the game’s lifecycle as it shifts from “global phenomenon” to “mundane media” and “service platform”, and highlights the different tensions in this process.
Yet our study is also shaped by the particular demographics and cultural context in which we conducted our research. Our data represents the experiences of Finnish speaking people, mostly living in Finland. While our study is explorative and does not aim to be representative, it should be noted that while some observations can be universal, certain findings may be exacerbated by this cultural context. The Finnish culture of social restraint, for instance, may have informed how the low-threshold sociality of the early months of the game has been seen as special and was missed, as well as how the forced sociality caused anxiety in some respondents. Differences between countries and the effect of nationality in play experience could be one avenue of future research, especially concerning the “forced” sociality.
After our survey, Pokémon GO has evolved even further, while the mentioned “burden” has only continued to expand. As the time of the writing, there are over 700 Pokémon that are mostly caught through random encounters (including many with rare “shadow”, “shiny”, “regional” and “mega” variants); over 60 medals, each with four tiers to unlock; and daily research tasks, themed and seasonal event-based tasks, online battle leagues, hourly raids, six-hourly Team Rocket balloon battles and daily streaks to upkeep. The monetisation and socialisation elements of Pokémon GO have continued to evolve alongside its new features. Notable changes have also been introduced in response to the pandemic. These have arguably made the game more accessible and less laborious, addressing some of the concerns identified by our respondents with significant new features added and adjustments made to accommodate travel and social distancing restrictions imposed during the pandemic. Therefore, it will be important to continue studying the changed experiences of ongoing upheaval caused by the pandemic, as well in other geographical and cultural contexts.
What became clear through our research is that Pokémon GO itself represents a unique scholarly challenge. This article features one of the largest scholarly datasets about Pokémon GO to date, with 61 codes extracted from 1,741 responses to an open-ended question about how the game has changed across three years. This has the advantage of providing rich insight into players’ experiences with the game. However, it also requires an investment in time and labour that, coupled with the game’s frequent updates and additions, ensures our findings become out of date almost as soon as we begin our analysis. Pokémon GO is not unique in this sense. Nonetheless, as an enormously successful free-to-play location-based game that is typically played in the dynamic urban environment rather than the static space of the home, the “burden” of keeping up to date with the game that our respondents describe can also be applied to academic research on it. Like players, scholars must also “keep up” with the game’s evolution and continue to conduct quantitative and qualitative studies in different cultural contexts throughout its many iterations to understand and analyse the impact of this unique phenomenon.
Footnotes
[1] Dragon Quest Walk and Let’s Hunt Monsters are only available in Japan and China respectively, but they remain the closest competitors to Pokémon GO globally.
[2] We shared the draft of the survey in one Facebook group and asked for feedback on it. After updating the survey based on the feedback, we shared it on Pokémon GO and related Facebook groups, and also encouraged people to circulate it further. Gift card raffle was used as an incentive for responding. We had asked the 2016 survey respondents if they would have liked to take part in follow-up studies, and sent the 2019 survey to those, who had agreed and given their contact information, separately.
[3] In addition to blank answers, 156 invalid responses were removed that did not answer the question or were otherwise incomprehensible by the analysers.
Author biographies
Kati Alha (PhD) is a researcher and a university lecturer, teaching game studies in Tampere University, Finland. She works at the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies, and has studied games from multiple perspectives since 2009, including research into free-to-play games, mobile games and location-based games.
Elina Koskinen (M.A.) is a doctoral researcher at Game Research Lab at Tampere University, Finland. She has been doing research on free-to-play games, location-based games and ethics & game design. Her PhD work concentrates on memorable player experiences in Pokémon GO.
Dale Leorke (PhD) is an independent researcher. He has published five books, among them Location-based Gaming: Play in Public Space (2018), Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City (2020) and The Library as Playground: How Games and Play are Reshaping Public Culture (2022).
Elisa Wiik (M.A.) is a doctoral researcher and one of the coordinators of the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies. Her Master’s thesis was about game-centric transmedia and her PhD project explores lapsed players and their connections to game cultures.
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