Pokemon Unite Is Becoming Disappointingly Greedy
Pokemon Unite is an excellent game, but it’s annoying how greedy some of its cash grabs are.
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Over the last few months, Pokemon Unite has slowly but surely established itself as one of my favourite games of 2021. With close to 100 hours played, I’ve managed to both reach Master rank and inadvertently increase my already ridiculous backlog – I bought Deathloop and Kena at launch and have yet to start either of them. Simply put, I hate how much I love Pokemon Unite.
The thing is, that hatred isn’t serious. It’s like when you say “I hate you” to someone because they post a video of you after a few more than a few beers. It was a joke, Mark. A Christmas joke. Halloween jokes, though? As it turns out, not quite as funny. Pokemon Unite’s first major event is centred on its money-hungry publisher showing its whole arse as brazenly as the egregiously large pumpkin in your neighbour’s front window. $40 for the promo Lucario skin? Mate, I thought we talked about this. 40 quid is enough for me to hop on a plane and fly to a different country.
As a means of prefacing my argument, I’d like to point out that Pokemon Unite is legitimately free-to-play, by which I mean complaints about it being pay-to-win are generally pretty baseless. Again, I’m max rank on the competitive ladder and have yet to put a single cent in. The held items debacle was polarising at the start, although everyone is capable of having at least three items at level 30 now, if not four, five, or six depending on the amount of time you’ve invested in the game. With excellent, versatile items like Muscle Band, Focus Band, Float Stone, Buddy Barrier, and Scope Lens on offer, having even three maxed out items is enough to give you coverage across at least half the roster. Pokemon Unite is not pay-to-win – it’s just really, really greedy elsewhere.
It’s fitting, then, that the latest Pokemon added to Unite’s rapidly growing roster is Greedent. Funnily enough, getting Greedent isn’t that difficult – if you simply sign in every day throughout the Halloween event, you’ll already have 57 of the 70 pumpkins necessary for unlocking its Unite license. All you need to do to surpass 70 from there is play ten matches in the Halloween-themed Mer Stadium and win at least one of them. That’s a two-second sign-in every day for two weeks and less than an hour of matches across that time period. You can obviously buy Greedent with Aeos coins or Aeos gems either, although it’s kind of a waste given how easy it is to accrue the required number of pumpkins.
Basically, Greedent is fine. Those pumpkins though? Well, there’s a sentence in the patch notes that specifically says there is no guarantee you’ll be able to earn enough pumpkins to unlock every pumpkin-gated reward, which is just… odd. I think most people will be able to get pretty much anything they care about, but it’s pretty bad optics for your first major event. “Here are the rewards locked by a limited-time currency. By the way you probably won’t earn enough of said currency to get all of them – have fun!”
Again, this isn’t particularly awful either. I doubt many people care all that much about Halloween Snapshot Frames or Pumpkin Pikachu Stickers. The issue, of course, is that aforementioned $40 skin for Lucario. Aside from Gengar’s Galactic Ghost 094 skin, Lucario’s new Costume Party Style is arguably the best cosmetic item Pokemon Unite has added to date. Again, though, it’s 40 quid. As I argued with Ninetales’ previous $40 skin, that’s enough to buy yourself a copy of The Witcher 3 – and an extra few for your mates, too.
The biggest issue is that on this occasion it’s an even more blatant case of inconsiderate money grubbing. Lucario’s skin, which is based on Sir Aaron from Pokemon: Lucario and the Mystery of Mew, has been the main promotional material for Unite’s entire Halloween event. People have been far more excited about it than they were about the weird new pumpkin-slinging minimatch event at Mer Stadium – which is admittedly enjoyable, if not a little half-baked. Everyone and their granny was looking forward to Unite’s strongest All-Rounder finally getting some much-needed cosmetic love. Nobody and no granny were looking forward to that dirty $40 price tag.
This, reader, is just pure greed. Pokemon Unite is a free-to-play live-service game and therefore needs to earn money from microtransactions in order to survive – the devs working on updates obviously need to be paid somehow. I am totally okay with that. There are plenty of free games out there like Warframe and Unite’s own cousin Pokemon Go that balance microtransactions with a sincerely fair ongoing offering that is completely gratis. At no point do these games force anything you need to pay for on you. The option to purchase additional items or skins or whatever else is always there, but it’s sufficiently inconspicuous as to be outside of the core experience.
Unite, however, has consciously employed a marketing tactic designed to drum up hype on social media to sell a skin nobody knew the actual cost of. I joked to one of the other editors here that I was going to spend real money on Unite for the first time after the Lucario skin was revealed. Surely I could forgo a coffee to part with a fiver, right? I mean, I’ve got almost 100 hours in the game – I probably owe it at least that much.
40 quid though? I know it’s not being demanded of me, you, or anyone else, but Jesus Christ it’s a grim ordeal. I can’t think of any skin in any game that’s worth that much – hell, I’ve never even seen a full-fledged DLC launch at that price. The Witcher 3: Blood & Wine is one of the best expansions of all time and is currently $6 on the PlayStation Store. Bloodborne’s The Old Hunters is arguably the best expansion of all time and is $20. A personal favourite of mine, Dragon Age Inquisition: Trespasser, is $15. You can get all three of these add-ons for a single dollar more than Unite’s latest premium skin, a glorified add-on that is audaciously presumptuous as per its own invented importance. Even skins in other free-to-play titles like Fortnite and Apex Legends are a fraction of the cost Unite is touting. It’s absurd.
I feel like I say this a lot – “Pokemon Unite is a great game, but-”. And do you know what? Pokemon Unite is a great game!
But…
Pokemon Unite is a great game but it is quickly becoming more and more dismally greedy. I was excited to have my Lucario rock a bona fide Van Helsing hat, but I could get a whole ass game for the price it costs. I’m probably going to keep playing and I’m definitely going to keep refraining from spending money, but stuff like this just stings a bit. At least regular Lucario already has one of the best designs in Pokemon history, eh?
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