Well, I Didn't Care for Pokémon GO Fest 2024: Global

If you can hear my complaints over the sound of cash registers, Niantic, I didn't have a great time.

Whaddya know—another hat for Pikachu!

There definitely was an audience for the global version of this year’s Pokémon GO Fest. While I played the two-day event that ran on July 13 and 14, 2024, as far as Niantic’s target audience goes, I know I wasn’t part of that group—and my player experience suffered as a result.

To even casual PoGO players, the format of Pokémon GO Fest is familiar by now. There are themed hour-long “habitats” which feature different Pokémon appearing in the wild in a rotation. There are Raids, often with one of the five-star Raid Bosses being a Legendary Pokémon making its debut. There’s Special Research which confers access to a new Mythical Pokémon. Event-related avatar items, Stickers, and confetti which rains down on the in-game map all help to set the visual scene. GO Fest is the game’s yearly celebration of Pokémon GO, the Pokémon franchise, and the Pokémon fandom. Overall, it looks and feels like a party.

A certain amount of familiarity is to be expected with Pokémon GO Fest, if not encouraged. With all there potentially is to do within the bounds of the event, it’s advantageous for Trainers to have a structure to count on and help mentally organize the proceedings. Then again, as the saying goes, you can have too much of a good thing, and as far as Andrew Ross, reporter for online MMO website Massively Overpowered and author of its column “Massively on the GO,” is concerned, it was all too familiar.

In his recap of Pokémon GO Fest 2024, titled “Pokémon GO Fest 2024 aimed straight at the wallet,” Ross characterized the event as “by far not the worst GO Fest, but it was both a paint-by-numbers experience and frustratingly premium.” On the first count—GO Fest as a “paint-by-numbers” experience—he doesn’t expound too much, but we can fill in some of the blanks. Clearly, on the side of wild encounters, many of the offerings were frustratingly common.

The Dawn Meadow Habitat featured, among other things, Hoppip and Pidgey, two Pokémon which have been all but inescapable the past few seasons. The Shining Day Habitat had Yungoos in it, another Pokémon which has felt plague-like at times in PoGO’s history and is among the most useless in the game, if not the franchise at large. Creeping Dusk Habitat? Why not throw in the obscenely abundant Eevee?

In all, a significant portion of the spawns available to all players have been easily accessible by virtue of their near-omnipresence in recent memory or their inclusion in Community Days and Community Days Classic. To boot, the majority of these Pokémon are not terribly relevant for PvP or PvE. Their appeal is their Shiny, the added Stardust gained when catching them, or their rarity as a regional encounter. The Darkest Night Habitat was perhaps most noteworthy for giving Trainers cracks at catching Gligar and Carbink, two GO Battle League mainstays in the current meta. A lot of the rest was forgettable, however. And where was Jangmo-o? As Ross underscores in his piece, the Dragon-type Pokémon which saw its Shiny debut at GO Fest 2024 was even scarcer than previous years’ highlights like Axew and Goomy despite being advertised as a spawn. Of course, it also was a one-star Raid Boss.

That ties into the second part of Ross’s characterization and fundamentally why I say this event wasn’t intended for me. “Frustratingly premium.” A great deal of emphasis was placed on Raids this GO Fest. In addition to Jangmo-o and costumed versions of Pikachu, Espeon, and Umbreon in one- and three-star Raids, Saturday’s action offered the full suite of Ultra Beasts as five-star Raid Bosses, sans Poipole and Naganadel, which Niantic introduced via Special Research. Sunday, meanwhile, was devoted exclusively to Necrozma, which saw its introduction as part of GO Fest 2024. Day Two marked the launch of Dusk Mane Necrozma and Dawn Wings Necrozma. What are those? Well, they are Pokémon fusions that involve fusing Necrozma with one of two other Legendary Pokémon and the use of—you know what?—the bottom line is you needed to do a bunch of Raids to get enough juice to do the whole gimmick Jones.

With one free Raid Pass per day and additional Raid Passes locked behind the $14.99 (in the U.S. anyway) Global Event Ticket or buying them à la carte from the in-game shop, the only way you were going to be a full participant would’ve been to pay up. And with the wild spawns being largely old hat barring—you guessed it—purchasing said ticket, if you weren’t joining Raids, you were like the odd man/woman/non-binary person out. Ross writes:

While powerful Pokémon are fun, what’s not fun is when most of the day’s content comes from a premium event that’s quite limited and asks you to still drop even more money, as Sunday was definitely that: ten passes for six hours of content is nothing even in my local area, at least because I make heavy use of Remote Raiders. Again, outside of new players, the spawns really don’t offer a lot compared to past years.

On that final note, like Ross, I don’t want to dismiss the enjoyment that new or fairly casual players might’ve found with these wild encounters. Even I, the grizzled old veteran, still get excited for a new Shiny, say. That said, I wasn’t motivated to play the rotating habitats more than once, and since I’m F2P, for a lot of the day, I was walking around by myself while groups of Trainers did Raid after Raid. In a crowded mall (the outside temperatures were upward of 90° Fahrenheit), it felt weird to be around so many people and yet feel so isolated, even in the presence of other PoGO players. Sunday had me go out for all of about an hour to finish the tasks for my free Special Research, but I had no desire to do more than the two Necrozma Raids I did the day before. Not for the middling rewards offered alongside the main draw.

Ross, though a paying player, if not feeling isolated, had his own cloudy thoughts about the Sunday experience. Again from his column:

What really hurt was that most of these rewards weren’t worth the effort. They were like sprinkles on top of a piece of cake, and much like sprinkles, the value really varies from person to person. The fact that the quests didn’t even renew just further made it feel as if Sunday was basically just Raid Day without any additional raid passes.

While I tried to talk to other players and even non-players during the event, I must admit that without raiding or knowing that I’d have to write this article, I would have gone home after the first hour or so. We didn’t get nearly enough passes to keep us entertained for six hours of just raiding, or at least, I didn’t feel that way as a daily player. I’m no streamer or hardcore PvPer, but my collection is pretty strong in terms of at least raiding [Pokémon,] and the PvPers I talked to seemed pretty relaxed about everything except chasing that perfect Necrozma. Sunday was Raid Day, and no one seemed to even pretend it could be otherwise.

Though the heat didn’t help matters, this was probably my lowest-effort GO Fest: Global since the feature started. I’m obviously not thrilled that it wasn’t as satisfying as past GO Fests, though in the face of disappointment after disappointment with Pokémon GO, I’m becoming habituated to the sting. At the end of the day, my sparser play saved me time and added frustration. So, good for me, I guess. Bad for Niantic, meanwhile, if they were hoping for positive (honest) feedback.

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Yes, this is an actual Pokémon.

That’s the thing, though. In isolation, my negativity only goes so far. Moreover, despite the gripes that many Pokémon GO players may have, when push comes to shove, they’re still ponying up for special events. To this effect, they’re not really batting much of an eye despite the escalating prices. It’s the cost of doing business, if you will.

Andrew Ross hits on this phenomenon in the closing to his column, which I do recommend you read—after finishing here, of course. From the article:

Niantic knows what it’s doing, though. Again, my local community is well plugged in and wise to the ways of Niantic, but it also spends deeply. My casual crew couldn’t be bothered to hang out, but they did spend on remote raids. And one person I don’t often see complained about the overall event being so heavy on premium items, yet the player still bought some on the webstore to “complete” the event. What this means is Niantic’s data most likely show these kinds of events make money despite what players say.

For all the muster of outcries at times behind the #HearUsNiantic campaign, Niantic understands that events like Pokémon GO Fest are still bankable. Last year, when GO Fest came to New York City as a separate ticketed event, Tub, one of my loyal readers and another content creator you should check out after you’re done with my blog (that “gimmick Jones” reference is borrowed from him), explained at the time why he wanted to attend despite his flagging enthusiasm for PoGO. Very directly and earnestly, he told me that he just wanted to have fun playing the game again.

For the most part, looking around at the people chatting and doing Raids during GO Fest 2024: Global, they were having a good time. Maybe as the event wore on, they were less gung-ho about the whole experience (for the uninitiated, fatigue is a genuine factor during these events, notably GO Fest), but generally speaking, much merriment was had.

I don’t blame Trainers for going this route. Most players don’t do PvP, and if they do, Necrozma is a solid asset to have for Master League. Otherwise, the Ultra Beasts, as Ross puts it simply, are “cool,” and save for Blacephalon and Stakataka (I am not making these names up—I assure you) have a chance to be Shiny. Sweaty battler or avid collector, the Raid experience at this year’s GO Fest was a welcome departure for many from the drudgery of non-event gameplay—and even to an extent the drudgery of the wild encounters from the very same event.

Is there a silver lining here? Ross sees one: that some of the players he knows who have quit have stayed that way. Tub, as of this writing, hasn’t picked Pokémon GO back up after quitting some months ago, having reached a breaking point with the game’s predatory monetization. Ross also gave a mention to the announced makeup day for Mega Rayquaza Elite Raids, calling it a “joke” and saying that the original event’s low attendance, especially when compared to GO Fest, proves “that Niantic’s attempts to shove Elite Raids down players’ throats comes at a literal price: people not paying to participate.” From a community that, as discussed, shells out for special occasions, it’s downright damning that PoGO fans would pass up on a chance to encounter a Pokémon as well-liked as Rayquaza.

At this point, however, it’s but a silver lining within the dark cloud hanging over Pokémon GO. The game has struggled with performance issues for some time now, but after a series of recent updates, it is borderline unplayable at times. This is felt most acutely on the PvP side, and ItsAXN, defending world champion and YouTube content creator, even made an eight-minute plea to Niantic to fix the laundry list of issues impacting GO Battle League/PvP. Sadly, I feel like his concerns will largely fall on deaf ears. Seemingly the only way John Hanke and Co. will be prompted to make changes is for players to stop paying or, better yet, stop playing altogether. In other words, things are going to have get much worse before they get better.