Pokémon Go Remote Raid Passes are getting new restrictions, price hike

Niantic changes how PokémonClick Here’s Remote Raids work. The company behind the mobile gotta-catch-’em-all game is raising the price of Remote Raid passes and limiting the number of Remote Raids that players can do in a single day. Niantic says that Raids played from far away have not only become a shortcut to play, but have “come to dominate the experience of playing Pokémon Go in a way we never intended.”

Here’s how pricing is changing: The price of a single Remote Raid Pass will increase to 195 PokéCoins (up from 100 PokéCoins); and the price of a Remote Raid Pass three-pack will increase to 525 PokéCoins (up from 300 PokéCoins). However, Remote Raid Passes may still be available to players through Research Breakthroughs.

Niantic is also limiting the number of Remote Raids per day, up to a maximum of five — though the company notes that may change (and increase) for special events.

“We plan to keep Remote Raid Passes as part of Pokémon Go,” the developer said in a blog post. “However, we believe this change is necessary for the long-term health of the game, and we do not make it lightly. “We feel that this change is necessary to achieve our goals of improving and preserving the special experience of playing. Pokémon Go—a game we hope you continue to enjoy long into the future.”

Polygon spoke with Ed Wu (VP of Information Technology), to learn more about the changes. Pokémon GoNiantic. The edited conversation can be viewed below. It begins with Wu explaining why the changes are necessary.

Ed Wu As you might imagine, with any change of this kind, we’re going to really evaluate every possible option, look at a bunch of data and think through a lot of different plants. But at the end of the day, the actual changes that we’re making are quite simple. We’re going to raise the price of remote raid passes, and we’re going to put a cap on daily usage. And there’s some game balancing changes we’ll make that are in addition to that: We’ll increase the XL Candy from five-star raids, as well as include a chance for remote raid passes to be delivered in research breakthrough rewards. We do plan to keep remote raid passes as part of Pokémon Go, but at the core, this change is necessary for the long-term health of the game, and for Niantic’s principles of getting folks outside and exploring the world together.

In 2017, the Raids feature was first designed. As we spun out from Google, I was the manager and lead of the Pokémon Go team who designed much of the technical architecture, and also built much of the raids feature itself, and led the team that built it. [Raiding] was one of the first promises that we made to the community in our launch trailer, as you might remember — and the reaction to the launch of the feature in 2017 was incredibly positive. Millions were raiding each other in parks and streets in the real world. This was very encouraging.

You might have guessed that all of this had to end in 2020. Players all over the world stopped having that ability to come together and meet up in real life to play Pokémon Go. So we decided to temporarily alter the game, introducing remote raid pass to let people continue having the fun of playing together even when they couldn’t physically be together.

Three years later, the outdoor lifestyle has returned to a large extent. And at the same time, we haven’t made changes to remote raid passes in the kind of magnitude that will be necessary to stop them from dominating the experience of playing the game in a way that we never intended. Remote raids, frankly, have become a shortcut to playing the game, and we’ve seen an imbalance in the game. The current price of remote raid passes is distorting that economy and it’s frankly making the game unsustainable in the long term. So really, in order to continue to operate a game that is sustainable for years to come, we’ve decided to raise the price of remote raid passes, in addition to having a daily cap. We know this is going to be a really big change and we’re empathetic to that. This isn’t about revenue short term. That’s where the cap comes in, I believe. The goal is to make the game viable for many years. [and] decades to come and continuing to get folks outside and explore the world together, which is the core value that we really believe that Pokémon Go brings to folks’ lives.

Polygon: Could you please explain how the distortions are affecting the economy? Pokémon Go. Please explain what it means to me.

I think it’s actually easiest to think back to the original raids mechanic to see why that’s the case. In order to pull off a raid when we initially launched it, you had to find a few — maybe 10 to 20 of your friends — other trainers, family members, members of the community and bring them together at the same time and same place, attempt a raid, and hopefully succeed at it. Then, if you wanted to do another raid, you’d walk together as a group for 10 to 15 minutes to the next location. All of this is called remote raids. This allows people to stay put and move from raid to raid over and again. The economy will crash like every other game with a limitless number of attempts. It’s going to dominate the overall sales and game economy for the whole of the game. In that sense, remote raid passes should be. […] placed in a position where there’s a value differential between the convenience it offers from a price point, as well as an overall cap to ensure that it does not overtake and dominate the economy as it does today.

Are you saying that the primary way that people are spending on Pokémon Go is on remote raid passes compared to, say, research tickets or coins? It might seem difficult to understand how remote raid passes can be sold to people in one day, when this is considered unsustainable. How is that not helpful to the economic health of Pokémon Go?

The day-to-day SKU dominance of a product is different from the day to day. There may be different buy products at different times. That said, the issue with remote rate passes is one of: we don’t want to create a transactional relationship with collecting and finding incredible legendary Pokemon. We don’t want that to be something where you do this thing over and over again, with no limits until you finish and then you just stop playing the game. That’s unsustainable and inconsistent with both the mission of exploring the world as well as the nature of Pokemon themselves. Like any other game, we have to think carefully about What are the most epic adventures that you’re having with the game, and that the value is just as much from the journey as it is from the ultimate experience, which is raids. So much of the value that folks get out of Pokémon Go is actually that social interaction — the walking, the exercise, the exploration that they do together. Allowing the shortcut to this will make it easier. [with] a premium raid pass, we’re actually taking away much of the value that is unique to our product and differentiates it from pretty much every other thing out there.

I’m not doing more than five remote raids in a day like that. That’s not valuable to me. However, I believe this will be interpreted by most as an incentivizing disincentive to remote raid passes. How instead are you incentivizing people to play the game in the fashion that you think aligns with Niantic’s philosophy? Obviously, Kecleon is one of the ways that you’re incentivizing people to go and visit Poké Stops, same with Scatterbug and Vivillon. But I’m curious what efforts you’re doing to incentivize this more. I know you’ve got in-person-only EliteRaids are great, but they can prove difficult for people who have time constraints. How can you make this greater incentive, and provide more convenience to players?

Here are some answers. I’ll start with some that are tactical to this specific change, and then I’ll broaden it to some of our wider features. One of the changes is increasing the amount XL Candy at five-star rates. It is this that makes it easier for trainers to run many distant raids to upgrade their Pokemon. [still get rewarded]. It has not been our intention to get deep into monetization via a limited number of users. That has historically not been the approach that we’ve taken towards the value that we want folks to be able to derive from the game. And we’re making this change of increasing the amount of XL Candy to provide a balance, I wouldn’t necessarily say an incentive, but a balance that actually is consistent with our values, when it comes to how we want to operate the business, which is to have a broad base of folks who really find value, and that we’re not just leaning in on a very small number of folks who do the same experience over and over and over again. So from a tactical perspective, that’s one of the ways that we’re approaching it for this specific change.

In general, features like Kecleon and Vivillon are continuing to be a focus of our attention. Those features were a great inspiration to people from all over the globe to visit the rest of the world and exchange postcards. And we’ve got an incredible new slate of features that are coming up this summer that I’m incredibly excited about. You know, this is the message that we’re bringing today: We’ve got our focus and attention on this specific balancing change. It is amazing to see the team working so hard on new features that will change how we play.

One thing that I’m very excited about the development for the summer is that it reminds me of the development that we did in 2017 for raids, or in 2018 for gifting and trading, or buddies afterwards. It’s got that level of engagement and excitement from the team for the size and shape of the features that we believe are going to change the way that folks play Pokémon Go and inspire them to actually explore the world together in the same way that those features did. There is nothing I can announce at this time. But I think that’s our core focus right and keep our eyes on the ball of let’s create new, exciting experiences, and make sure that we’ve got the game’s economy in a great place going into that, so that folks will be inspired to go out there and experience it for themselves.

When you were talking about the thin tail of the audience that will probably be affected by this change, they’ll also be the most vocal about this. When I’ve spoken to people at Niantic before, they said some of these kinds of changes are relevant to 0.2% of the overall player base — people who are going to be responding on Twitter or on The Silph Road, they’re going to be the vocal ones who were say, In fact, I have to use my remote rates 10 times a day.

I don’t want to marginalize their voices, because they’re among the most enthusiastic players of our game, who really do carry our message out into the wider community. I really think one of Pokémon Go’s traits, though, is its diversity of audience. One of the things I often note to my team is that when I look at the data, the median player of Pokémon Go is probably someone like a Singaporean grandma, who walks for 30 minutes to an hour a day with her senior group in the morning to catch Pokemon and very, very occasionally raids, if at all. These are people who play daily and are an integral part of the distribution of this diverse community. When we think about sustainability for the long-term economy of games, it is important to consider all segments. For the long-term sustainability and overall health of the game, it is important to address the dominant role of remote raid passes. So I don’t want to diminish the kind of impact of those changes on those folks. But I do want to highlight that the XL Candy changes in particular are meant to move folks back into a situation where they don’t feel like they have to put in dozens and dozens of remote raid passes in order to stay up to date with the game.

Can you speak a bit more about the effects of the additions to Kecleon, Vivillon and in-person Elite raids and post-Community Day raid hours? Is there an increase in the number of people who gather in public places? Do you see an increase in the number of new friends? Are there ways to gauge the effect of these things so that you can feel confident they are doing a good job? You need to work harder?

Actually, one of the most important projects I’ve worked on with our team over the past few years has been how to quantify that very question. We came up with a measure called “real-world social interactions”, which can be used to track how many people are playing together in the game. And that number is up significantly this year, because of precisely the sort of changes that you’ve noted. People are inspired to play with each other in real life by features like elite raids and those that only work in real-life. We expect that the people who use remote raid passes most are the ones who actually play real-life raid features most. Sso that gives us the confidence that if we built the great features that actually inspire folks to go out in the real world, and we make sure that the game economy is well aligned towards encouraging them to do so, that we can make this change with a degree of confidence that we’ve got the data and history that backs it up. In the past year in particular, we’ve seen that real-world social interactions, that colocated kind of play time, goes up and up and up as folks have gotten more and more used to being out there together in the real world. It is our goal to provide features that encourage them to play together.

The other incentives I was interested in were also aligned to the philosophy. I feel like raid pools have, outside of the Elite raids, that there haven’t been a ton of new additions I’d say the same as is true for Eggs; I’ve reached the stage of the game where I’m kind of hatching Eggs and completing Weekly Research tasks out of an obligation, but I’m not excited about what I’m getting out of them. Do you have plans to improve these elements of the game?

Absolutely. Because it touches on many different issues right, I believe your questions are extremely timely. Your notes on the raid pool explain why this is necessary. We don’t want to be in a position where our entire economy, our entire balance is devoted to Okay, now how do we get the best out of our raid pool?Your notes point out the insuability of current approaches. In a way, this is also about focusing on the ball, but making sure other aspects of the game, such as our weekly research and incubator mechanics are just as fun and exciting as possible. These are just two examples of how this lack of sustainability has become a reality. Also, proactive efforts are being taken to ensure that Pokemon can be collected in many different ways.

Here’s one: the Pokemon location cards that were created by Go Tour Vegas. It was a great opportunity for people to connect their experiences with that place and time to a beautiful background. It was a great way to show how rare the Groudons & Kyogres they caught were. So I think what you can see there is a glimpse into one of our many efforts to continue to bring location and memory and Pokémon all together in a way that’s truly special for every trainer.