The new Pokémon MOBA Pokémon Unite is currently facing harsh criticism from players. There are supposed to be serious pay-to-win offers in the shop. What is the truth?
What is the business model of Pokémon Unite? Pokémon Unite utilizes five monetization methods that allow you to spend real money and finance the game:
- A premium battle pass that lets you unlock special goodies
- Improvements for the gacha system (Energy Rewards)
- Cosmetics
- Buying characters
- Items that you can use in the game.
It is specifically the last point on the list that concerns some players.
Shop items are supposed to provide permanent bonuses in the game
What is the accusation against P2W? While it is completely fine in MOBAs to specifically buy characters or cosmetics, Pokémon Unite also allows the purchase of items that have direct impacts on the game.
For example, you can obtain a “Rocky Helmet” that damages opponents when they hit you. You can then further upgrade these items by spending real money, among other things. Other items provide bonuses to damage, speed, or healing. Thus, those with good stats will be significantly better than players who do not have them.
How is this justified? According to a detailed and widely noted reddit post (via reddit, over 23,000 upvotes on July 24, 2021), written by an alleged free-to-play mobile developer, this “pay-to-win” mechanic is increasingly becoming a problem the longer the game is played. The free progression is so slow and tedious that a seriously interested player eventually has to spend money to remain competitive in battles.
Thus, according to the reddit users, after the motivational phase at the beginning of the game, they are ultimately forced to spend money, which would be unreasonable in a game for children, as Pokémon Unite is meant to be.
In addition, there are various player comments on Reddit:
- Shane727: “I love MOBAs and Pokemon, so a mobile MOBA that I can dive into sounded fun, but how can you have a MOBA where not everyone in the lobby is on the same power level?”
- 10110011101101: “I didn’t have high expectations, but foolishly thought they wouldn’t do [pay-to-win]”
- CynicalDutchie: “I mean, did you really expect anything different? This game was made for the Chinese market and for no one else.”
- MegaNRGMan: “It’s funny, you all seem shocked about pay-to-win in a MOBA, even though League of Legends was definitely considered pay-to-win in the past. League had rune pages that you had to fill with purchasable runes, and the difference between a full rune setup and none or low runes was actually quite large.”
What kind of game is this? Pokémon Unite is a MOBA. Two teams of 5 Pokémon battle it out in an arena and try to defeat the opposing team. Our author Phillip Hansen has played the game and found it very good so far.
