Niantic addresses backlash to upcoming Pokémon GO Remote Raid changes, stands by decision

“It’s a big and meaningful change to a huge part of the game… so as you might imagine for a change of this magnitude, we’ve of course examined many possible alternatives. After thinking very carefully about this, what we’re doing is relatively simple. Generally speaking, the goal is to keep Remote Raids as a part of Pokémon Go, but to do so in a sustainable way. The change is necessary for the long term health of the overall game, and our principles of getting folks outside and exploring the world together.

The world has largely moved back outdoors and Remote Raid passes have come to dominate the overall experience of playing in a way we never intended. It’s become essentially a shortcut to playing the game. We’ve seen an imbalance because the current price of Remote Raid passes is matched to the Premium Battle Pass which is distorting the game economy, and making the game unsustainable in the long term.

We know this is a big change and some folks will have a strong reaction to that. We’re very empathetic to that reaction. But we really think this is the right thing for the overall long term health of the game, and our desire to make sure it’s great for many, many, many years to come.

There’s a wide variety of folks who play Pokémon Go. Generally speaking, the number of people who will be affected by the cap on a day-to-day basis is a relatively small part of the total set of folks who play our game. It’s often sometimes useful to ground what the median player of Pokémon Go is – it’s something I talk about with the team all the time. The median player of Pokémon Go is probably someone like a Singaporean grandma who walks with her senior group for 30 to 60 minutes every morning as part of her exercise and social routine, [who] mostly focuses on catching Pokémon with her friends, and maybe very occasionally or maybe not at all raids.

It’s important to ground [the fact] the vast majority of folks in our game find a lot of value in Pokémon Go from many other parts of the game beyond raiding. But the game balance and economics of Pokémon Go are now being dominated by Remote Raids in a way we never intended. And for a segment of the player population, this is fundamentally unsustainable. It constitutes a small, small part of the player population, [but] it’s a player population we care deeply about as they are some of our most engaged players who have invested many, many years, and much of their attention and enjoyment into this game. And it’s important to make sure the game is balanced for all segments.

Many games have shortcuts, right? When games offer shortcuts, they also ensure these don’t distort the overall value of the game by doing things like imposing limitations on the number of times they can be used. So in many ways, this is actually very analogous to a wide variety of games that have similar loops, and where ultimately, a game is about both the journey as well as the destination.”