After 9 years of playing Pokémon Go at varying intensities, it is now Pokémon gone (the pun is obvious, but I had to take it!). While I enjoyed the game a lot during its early years, over time its frustrating or overly-monetised aspects overtook its enjoyable ones enough that playing it no longer made much sense.
Writing out my thoughts on deleting the game made me think more about “forever games”, and how weird it is that you can now measure the active life of major games beyond just “years” and instead into “meaningful fractions of a person’s lifespan”. I do wonder how that time-maths affects people’s decisions about what games they choose to keep playing, and whether it allows games to hold on to players through the sunk-cost-fallacy or through inertia to a greater extent than in the past.
But for now, here are more words than I expected about my many years playing PoGo, and about deciding to stop playing it.
Starting Out
When I started writing this post, it was a couple of days after the 9th anniversary of PoGo’s release. Although I first opened the game, and so technically started playing, on day one, the only device I could use was my Nexus 7, which did not have working location access. So I couldn’t actually catch any Pokemon until I revived a spare rooted Android phone about two weeks later. (That’s just reminded me of how much I liked the Nokia Lumia I’d had at the time, and that the main reason I stopped rooting my phones was because Niantic started barring rooted devices from PoGo).
My delayed real introduction to the game had one advantage; because I hadn’t been able to catch any of the default starters on day one, I had seen the secret starter Pikachu spawn. Once I could play, I was able to choose Pikachu as my starter.
I started playing Pokémon Go mostly out of curiosity, and what I had learned from my friend group’s excitement. While I knew a little about Pokémon, and could identify the famous ones like Charmander and Pikachu, I had very limited knowledge of the games (For context, I was confused when I first heard the sound options in the Pokédex, as I was expecting the Pokémon to say their names!). This meant Pokémon Go was my introduction to many of the items, mechanics, and terms of the franchise, as well as to all Pokémon beyond Gen 1.
2017 – 2020
During the first few years of the game, I played it nearly every day, partly because for much of that time I often needed the assistance/distraction of the game to leave the house. Leaving for a purpose e.g. to go to work, was fine, but leaving without a defined reason/route was anxiety-provoking. Being able to specify a reason, even if that reason was just “hatching my next egg” or “trying to claim a gym”, was a useful way to get over that first hurdle.
Me and Danny took part in almost every Community Day, and went on spontaneous Poké-walks. My sister, who was 9 at the time, has just started to have a Pokémon phase, so I let her play a bit on my phone; this had the side effect of getting my mum into Pokémon. My mum played Pokémon Go even more consistently than me, and I think she still plays it occasionally.
I accidentally made my nan a minor fan too. My nan is so tech-averse that she has never used a computer and can only use a phone to make and recieve calls. But when I asked her to hold my phone for a car trip as I was expecting an egg to hatch, and she then saw a creature hatch onto the phone, she was surprisingly amused. As a result, she started asking to play “Pokemons” in the car more often, and she learnt how to spin stops, tap on Pokémon, feed them berries, and throw Pokéballs at them. Evolving was out of the question, however, as it made the Pokémon “less cute”.
I can give Pokémon Go about 80% of the credit for getting my nan familiar enough with touchscreens that she became ok with the idea of having a smartphone for safety purposes. Also, when she had her 75th birthday just before the Covid lockdowns started in 2020, she enjoyed a Pikachu birthday cake.
2021-2022
While there wasn’t a specific “final straw” change that made me leave the game, previous individual decisions had led me to play it less. The biggest of these decisions was Niantic’s attempt to repeal the safety measures they put in place during 2020, which was very disappointing because of how those measures had helped players for reasons beyond social distancing.
Increasing the distance that Pokéstops could be activated from, and introducing remote raid passes, meant that players with limited mobility could reach stops and gyms that had previously been in inaccessible areas. On a smaller note, it also allowed adult players to spin stops at locations like schools without needing to stand close enough to confuse or concern parents. Buddy Pokémon fetching gifts from Pokéstops, and a free Daily Task being generated each day, meant that players in rural or isolated areas were better able to access resources and complete quests.
Trying to remove these measures was a worrying call, but the fact that Niantic listened to the resulting organised boycott and rolled back these changes, meant I was then happy to continue to play.
2023-2024
During 2023-2024, I had been playing Pokémon Go a lot less often. Me and Danny had never resumed our Community Day sessions after the Covid measures receded, and I had stopped needing digital assistance to go for walks for a couple of years at this point. While I had enjoyed saving costumed or shiny Pokémon to trade with friends who missed out on catching them, the trade pile had steadily grown into a significant portion of my storage as those friends all stopped playing.
I also stopped spending real-world money on the game, after I did the maths on my exported google account data and realised that Pokémon Go had become the most expensive game I’d ever owned. While the amount I spent is small in the grand scheme of things, and I was nowhere near being one of the “whale”s that F2P game manufacturers seek, crystallising my payment history into that fact made me re-evaluate whether spending money on the game was worthwhile for me or not.
Closing Down
Over the last year, PoGo had become something I checked up on every few weeks, and played occasionally on lunch-break walks, rather than a regular occurrence.
The game-ending moment for me was a couple of months ago. I opened the game, looked at the unceasing exclamation-mark-filled announcements, the desperate-seeming acceleration of new gimmicks being introduced since the last time I had played, and the ever-increasing forms of monetisation and artificial scarcity… and my first thought was “every time I come back, something has changed for the worse”. That was when I firmly knew deleting the game was the right option.
Before deleting my account, I visited the Pokémon Go website to check the details of the updates I mentioned earlier. Seeing the near-daily broadcasts of updates, announcements, and events evoked fatigue more than anything else. Reading about the Gold Bottle Cap item, which requires players to level up a paid battle pass to level 100 within one week, then to spend up to a year training the Pokémon they give the item to, made me even more sure of leaving. (Even worse, the item expires a week after the battle pass ends, causing players to either rush into a potentially wrong choice, or lose an item they paid to acquire!)
At that point, the only thing that kept my game installed was my reluctance to delete my oldest Pokémon. (I get sad on behalf of inanimate things, and virtual animals, far too easily). Also, some of those little guys had lived on my phone(s) for 8 years – that’s over a quarter of my life!
But I know what I’m like when discarding sentimental things: its the getting rid that my brain is bad at, not the being rid. I was 95% sure that within a few days of deleting the meaningful Pokémon, my feelings towards the game would reset to neutral. I wouldn’t have any desire to rebuild the collection or play PoGo any more without that anchor of sentimental inertia.
Last month, I tested that theory and let go of all of my Pokémon except for the un-transferable mythical ones. In the moment I felt like I was doing something wrong, and I even separately apologised to my favourite Rhydon and to my special Piplup. (“Special” in this case meaning it had perfect stats + was shiny + was lucky + was wearing a hat + had a best buddy medal.)
But my hypothesis was correct: a couple of days later, my brain had reset. When I opened the game to take screenshots of the stats before deleting my account, I still played it for a bit first, but I didn’t care enough about PoGo to want to make a new collection of creatures or to understand the new additions and mechanics.
I finally pressed the delete button on July 8th, and confirmed via email on the 9th. After trying the “find sign-in” details on Niantic’s website last night, and having it fail to find my username, I’m reasonably confident that they’ve actually deleted my data. So I’m now back to having my only “forever game” be Destiny 2, which at least has the power of friendship to keep me invested.
The Poké-stats
39,304 – Pokemon caught
803 – Unique basic Pokemon caught
2,318 – km walked while actively playing
22,023 – Pokestops visited
28% – amount of my lifetime PoGo has existed for.
£498- amount spent from 2016-2022.