SmokeAndMirrors
DP Veteran
- Joined
- May 20, 2011
- Messages
- 18,282
- Reaction score
- 16,154
- Gender
- Female
- Political Leaning
- Other
It's a freemium game. You can play for free, but you can buy gems to make it easier. But as with all of these games, the amount you can actually do for free becomes smaller and smaller and the amount that you need to actually "win" becomes more and more expensive, until you simply cannot be competitive unless you throw a ton of money into the game. That's how they make their money. Nothing in the world is free.
You know, it actually isn't so bad in this one, and it doesn't get any worse as you move up. If anything, it actually gets easier -- almost too easy.
You can earn coins by taking over a gym. And you can take over a gym even if you have weaker Pokemon than whoever's holding it. As long as you type-match and have a fairly long line-up, you can take over a gym with a pair of 1,000 CP Pokemon even if none of yours are higher than 400 CP. You just might need 6 of them (and that's not hard to achieve).
You get free revives, potions, and pokeballs at Pokestops. You get lures, lucky eggs, and incense at some level-ups. You have an infinitely reusable egg hatcher.
And really, if you want to get rare, very high CP Pokemon, the only way to do that is to hatch eggs. You can't buy eggs, and you can't hatch them faster by paying. You can only hatch them by walking.
The emphasis really is on walking. That's the only way to catch or hatch Pokemon, it's the only way to battle at gyms, etc. You can pay for the other items, but when I have, like, a dozen pokestops in a 2 block radius and I cover that track pretty much every single day... why?
I think this one's actually ok. It's not a game that stops you every 10 minutes where you can either pay or wait an hour or grind for 10 hours. There's really no point where you either have to stop having fun, or pay. But, they do need to make money -- especially for their desperately needed server upgrades -- so they do let you buy that stuff too. And I think they've done it right.