My List of Followed Channels on Twitch Is a Pokémon GO Graveyard

RIP.

Ash was all, like, PogChamp, and Haunter was, all, like, LUL.

On March 12, a Twitch streamer and competitive battler who goes by the handle themanintheplanet, posted a series of tweets on Twitter/X about his decision to go on a hiatus from streaming his GO Battle League sets. Since you probably won’t click the link anyway, I’ll copy and paste them for you.

After giving it some thought, I will be taking a break from streaming GBL for the rest of this season. The game is in a terrible state, especially with 1-turn lag, and I am just not enjoying GBL at the moment as much as I have in the past.

I do like sharing my battles with you all, but I feel like I am not giving the best streams possible when I am frustrated with the game not working. I may stream my eventual legend push this season if I have a good idea when it will be.

I am cautiously hopeful that a change of management could be good for the game and hope that Scopely can work on fixing the game. I know there have been rumors of a GBL refactor and am eager to see the results of that.

For everyone who has supported the stream by watching, chatting, subbing, raiding, etc, I am very grateful. The community is what makes this game great.

Though not a religious viewer, I’ve enjoyed themanintheplanet’s streams. Like me, he’s a David Lynch enthusiast and a lover of alternative/indie music, and I think he’s one of the nicest and most thoughtful members of the Pokémon GO community I have encountered online. To this effect, he actually has a channel points redemption to compel him to say something mean. Toxic, he is not.

As a reader of this blog, you’ve heard me gripe about the state of PoGO and GBL for weeks on end, so if you haven’t experienced the game firsthand, you at least have one man’s subjective experience about playing it. For someone as even keeled as themanintheplanet tends to be to sour on it, though—and a much better battler, no less—this should speak volumes about its present quality.

As fate would have it and as I was writing this piece, themanintheplanet went live on Twitch for a Legend push, ultimately achieving the desired rank. Whether he returns for anything more than a cameo appearance after hitting paydirt remains to be seen. On one hand, I hope he returns because I respect him as a member of the Pokémon GO community and a competitive battler. On the other hand, I hope he doesn’t come back because, as someone who struggles with emotional regulation, I’d imagine it’s probably better for his mental well-being if he doesn’t, especially if he takes time away from the game in general.

Anecdotally speaking, themanintheplanet abandoning GBL streams entirely or severely limiting his content output to sporadic appearances is one of many such losses for the PoGO category on Twitch. Going down my list of Followed Channels, it’s a veritable graveyard of the fallen when it comes to GO Battle League content. Sure, I do continue to see new faces on the popular live-streaming service. That said, I’ve witnessed the number of consistent GBL streamers dwindle markedly since I became a habitual Twitch user, and even the ones that do often openly acknowledge the precarity of this mode of play. On more than one occasion, Decibelviper has said he’s going live in an attempt to keep the category on Twitch alive, and I recall seeing SsThorn, a tournament regular, once title his stream “GBL sucks.” Please—tell us how you really feel, Thorn.

In defense of Pokémon GO and the people who make it, not all lapsed Twitch streamers are necessarily disenfranchised with the state of the game. Some, owing to life changes like a new job or starting a family, might simply not have the time/energy to commit to being as terminally online as the rest of us. It’s also worth noting that the lifting of COVID restrictions and people spending more time offline and in the company of others are likely factors in declining viewership. That said, it’s probably not a good sign that, according to the website TwitchTracker.com, the Pokémon GO Twitch category hasn’t cleared 500K hours watched in a month since August 2024 and has only cleared 600K hours watched in a month twice since October 2022. Mitigating factors aside, the trend is clearly not an upward one.

Scopely and their parent company Savvy Games Group possess an apparent desire to expand in the mobile gaming sphere, particularly within the esports realm. But if they greenlit PoGO’s purchase with this aspect in mind, they’ve got their work cut out for them. The game overall is still generating its fair share of revenue, but increasingly, PoGO on Twitch is resembling a bloated corpse.

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Yes, the Pokémon franchise has a haunted sandcastle Pokémon. Do with this knowledge what you will.

As some of you may know, I streamed Pokémon GO battles on Twitch, as the kids say, for a hot minute. My last stream ended with technical issues, and if I have any real regrets about that being my swan song, it’s that it ended so abruptly and because of those hiccups. When I stopped that broadcast, my thinking wasn’t that it would be my finale. Pretty much immediately after the spotlight was turned off, I figured out what my mistake was. In the heat of the moment and because I am a boomer in a millennial’s body, I couldn’t fix it on the fly. These kinds of things don’t come easy to me.

Shortly thereafter, though, I had a routine physical with my primary care physician and found that I wasn’t in as great of health as I could be. More specifically, I needed to lose weight and address the health problems associated with substandard nutrition and a more sedentary lifestyle. Thus, I began to focus on diet and walking and spent less time on GO Battle League in general, let alone airing my sets for all the Internet to see. I’ve made some progress on the road to a better me, but I still have a long way to go, and I still have my lapses from time to time.

A little older and probably not much wiser, I’ve toyed with the idea of coming back to streaming in some capacity. After the start of what became my own Twitch hiatus, I felt a sense of trepidation just thinking about my stream setup, and to be honest, faced with the prospects of a theoretical return, I’d be a little fearful about what else could go wrong. In the weeks, months, and years now that have passed, however, I’m less concerned with how broken my streams might be and more preoccupied by how broken GBL is as a function of PoGO’s overall struggles.

When it comes down to it, GO Battle League hasn’t been capital-F fun for me for several seasons now, a reality made worse by lag and Niantic’s uninspired curation of each campaign’s schedule. Whenever I find time to sit down and try to complete a few sets, my heart drops, and I become anxious. If the outcome is positive, my primary sensation is relief. If the outcome is negative, I mald terribly (if you’re unfamiliar with the term “malding,” here’s a Wiktionary definition) and often carry my negativity forward with me. It’s not the kind of experience I want to have on the regular, and it’s certainly not the kind of content I’d want Twitch viewers to see.

In all, the subject of what, barring a change, amounts to my failed Twitch streamer tenure is a strange mix of emotions, and it’s difficult to even find the words to address this topic. I want to come back to streaming as a means of expressing myself and because I know others really enjoy my presence within the PoGO/Twitch community, but I don’t want to bring any more toxicity with my moods to an online media landscape that already has enough of it. I want to improve as a battler and not feel like I’m letting Pokémon GO beat me, but at the same time, I’d be doing so in spite of the recognition that the game has let me down as much as I’ve let myself down, if not more so. Like I said earlier in this piece, when I ended my last stream prematurely, my thinking wasn’t that it would be my finale—and I’m not necessarily closing the book on streaming altogether. However, if and when I do resurface, I can’t imagine at this point that it would be to play GBL. I would have to seriously rekindle that fighting spirit, and quite frankly, I’m not terribly optimistic on that front.

So, maybe one day you’ll see me on Twitch again—I don’t know—trying to complete some runs in Balatro. Maybe eventually I’ll make a space for playing video games at home with an actual video game console or legitimate gaming PC. Anything is possible. Pokémon GO streams, though? That doesn’t seem worth the trouble, and I’d like to think that I’m not alone in this assertion.