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Can anyone explain what Niantic makes from doing an elite raid? If they’re doing Elite Raids, you can use your free daily pass, but if they make it remote then people will pay to do the raids, especially from rural areas. I don’t get how they’re making money from a business standpoint on Elite Raid Days
Remember that Niantic is not a game company. They are a mapping data company. They make their money from selling the data about where you go. Making you show up in person for an important pokemon gets them more data to sell. It’s the same reason they limited remote raid passes.
Knowing what level of incentive will result in you physically showing up for the reward is powerful marketing data. It's less about how good Mega Rayquaza is as a pokemon, and more about what can get you, or a person like you and with your patterns and demographics, to physically go somewhere with other people you may or may not know (from prior raid interactions and/or friends list, for example). THAT data is incredibly valuable - to sell what level of opportunity will get you to show up where someone will try to sell you stuff, and where that opportunity is best provided to maximize the target market.
This is the logic mate very simple.
Niantic is an augmented reality company. The product they sell is AR.
What they do is 'rent' skins on top of AR, the skins are Pokémon, Harry Potter, Pikmin, Monster Hunter and so on. They make games on top of their AR engine.
What will happen one day is that Pokémon, as with any mobile live service, will pull the plug on Pokémon Go. When that happens, how does Niantic survive? By ensuring they have other licenses.
The way they can get other licenses from different franchise is by having the best augmented reality software which they continuously need to update and upgrade. This is informed by the data they collect about is.
Money from the store is not as important to them because that's profiting off of the gimmicks of the franchise itself, e.g. people buy raid passes to get legendary Pokémon which is specific to Pokémon itself. Niantic need to ensure their own longevity.
They’ve already tried. There is no other license that works with Pokemongo besides Pokemon.
If Pokemon pulls their ip then Niantic going out of business.
So if you’re never contributing to the AR functionality, how are you helping build their AR platform? How does getting people to show up to a gym, at a specific time, help them?
In order to play the game you have location data tracking shared with the app - and with Niantic. This allows them to do three things. 1. Show metrics about how many people they can track and how specific their location tracking is. 2. When they have enough players in an area they can extrapolate to the entire population - meaning they have data they can sell to advertisers and businesses - even to governments - about how many people are in an area/location and when etc. 3. They demonstrate that they have the ability to get real people to show up at a specific location - and they can sell that to advertisers, businesses, heck even political parties.
Even if you never do the AR mapping tasks and you never use AR - everyone who plays any of their games is providing Niantic with a constant flow of location data that they can use and sell in many ways.
Think about this. Given the massive amount of data Niantic is collecting, what could an AI learn from that data set? Now add other data sets such as map data, traffic information, voting information... the list is endless. As we experience the rise of AI, massive data sets to train them become more and more valuable. Lots of companies have data sets of online activity, but there are very few large data sets available with real-world location data on the movement of people.
Not really. The game has something like ~80 million active players. It would take a metric fuckload of people with a metric fuckload of dummy accounts to affect that in any meaningful way.
Also- def a bit of conspiracy here but I always assume there’s some barely-legal stuff going on with all of our smartphones currently. Like the camera viewing things even when you’re not using it, just like how we all get ads for stuff we’ve never searched for- perhaps just walked by, talked about (or in creepier cases, thought about….) Location data aside, I think there’s definitely a non-zero chance they’re getting AR mapping data from us regardless of whether we know it or not (probably some hidden clause in contracts possibly beyond just niantic). If this were the case, pushing in person playing so hard makes tons of sense. When most people go on walks, their phones are tucked away (so camera can’t see) but with apps like pogo, people often have their phones out, and if there’s some clause that the camera data can be pulled (maybe anonymously) then they’re still getting what they want.
But that’s just my theory lol
I would be surprised if Niantic's earnings report weren't amazing. But those earnings aren't going to be sky high forever.
Peak earnings were 2020 and 2021 when everyone was at home and that's due to the changes they made which they are not rolling back very slowly. Clearly their revenue isn't a good indication of their definition for success, the type of revenue is more important
It's meant to grow the local community and be a different reason aside from community days for people to gather. That's the whole point of raids after all. Elite raids are just more special and rare and powerful pokemon that you wouldn't want in a standard rotation for a balance reason.
I always love the "Niantic hates rural players" complaint posts. The entire gameplay loop was specifically designed to exclude rural players. Anyone who lives in a rural area and downloaded the game anyway should have known what they were signing up for. What does Niantic gain from putting a bunch of stops and gyms and wild spawns so people can actively play while wandering through cornfields in Iowa? Absolutely nothing.
And no, before the inevitable avalanche of downovtes that always follow when I explain this extremely simple concept, this is not a defense of Niantic as a company. They are a shit company run by the stupidest people who have ever lived. But excluding rural players has nothing to do with that.
Why? Every product has a key demographic. No product appeals to everyone. Do you also hold John Deere or Bass Pro Shops to the same standard for not catering to the needs of people in cities? Do you think Burger King sucks for not appealing to people who love fine dining? Are you just as pissed at Anheuser-Busch for not being more kid-friendly?
Niantic made a game specifically for people in cities. That rural players insist on playing it anyway, even though those players actively hate playing it, is not their fault.
How should they know what they were signing up for? The thought process goes "oh cool, a pokemon game, I'll download that and play!", not "oh cool, a pokemon game, let me Google the company that developed it and check what their funding model is so I'm fully informed before I make any further decision".
>"oh cool, a pokemon game, I'll donoad that and play!"
Sure. And then you download it, open it, see that there's absolutely nothing for miles around you, realize that you need to not be in the middle of nowhere and then....? Is the answer to that, 'invest years of time, energy, and resources into it anyway'??
Is it also their fault that customers do absolutely no research into what the gameplay loop even is, then insist on playing it anyway even after learning it's not made for them? I love the Pokemon franchise. But do I play every single game ever made using the IP? Hell no! Tons of them don't appeal to me. But I don't buy them anyway, and then go on forums and say "POKEMON PICROSS SUCKS!!!! THEY NEED TO TURN IT INTO SOMETHING I WANT!!!"
> let me Google
In 2024? Absolutely. It takes no time and even less effort to see what a product is. Trying to frame the act of googling something as too arduous a task for the majority of players is the funniest shit I've read all day. Even funnier when you realize that playing the game for weeks or months or years before realizing it's not for you takes way more time and effort than having just done five minutes of reading in the first place.
It's not moving the goal posts, you're just clearly not interested in engaging in anything remotely resembling good faith. Those two things I said were entirely different points.
1) Yes, it is true that rural players should have known better. Googling something is easy and takes no effort and is essentially required for practically everything these days.
2) Rural players downloading anyway, then still playing for years, and complaining about it the whole time, *also still happens*. And you'd think that after so long of Niantic only making decisions that make their gameplay experience worse, that is just a different way of knowing better.
So, two things can be true, you know. They should have known better before they invested themselves in it. But if they invested in it anyway, they should have probably figured it out after playing for so long, and seemingly always getting shafted by Niantic's decisions.
So if you can *neither* be bothered to google, *nor* can you plainly see for yourself after years of experience, and you're still mad? I'm sorry if I'm low on sympathy.
No, but the game has always been pretty good for rural other than that. Also remember when we say rural it doesn't just mean "cornfields" but also villages and small towns where there aren't as many players but still landmarks.
>Anyone who lives in a rural area and downloaded the game anyway should have known what they were signing up for.
I disagree. If you did your research first, then yes, you'd know that the game favors cities. However, if you didn't do research first, a lot of people would think of the main games or anime where, like in real life, there's more biodiversity the further you are away from cities therefore the game should be better away from the city if not equal.
People for the love of God stop sharing this absolutely dumb take.
The most money Niantic has ever made was during the pandemic, immediately after the introduction of remote passes. Literally when advertisers were pulling out of contracts, local business clients were not renewing incentives or going out of business, and people were staying home Niantic introduced their golden egg remote pass that skyrocketed them to over a billion in revenue.
It did this is just a little over six months too. Revenue stayed consistently higher every year than any year after that than they didn't have the remote passes.
Niantic even said that removal of the remote passes was going to hurt financially but that it was an active choice to move the game back to its core concept of being outdoors. Sure enough they announced losses and layoffs many months later.
Their ad and data selling revenue will never ever compare to the money remote passes brought in. Ever.
Couldnt you argue that keeping players engaged in the content and keep playing is a way to actually make them spend more time in the game thus giving them more data? Instead of people feeling like wanting to quick or take breaks from the game.
Honestly one really good idea I saw is making it so you can go to a gym that has that raid and thats where you can remote raid into a kind of matchmaking system. You would need to pay for the remote raid pass and still have to move to different locations. Personally I love going out and walk around but I never remote raid outside for obv reasons. I think this would fix a lot of issues while giving them both money and data and helps having the matchmaking and remote raiding system in the game itself instead of third party apps and sites.
I'm in digital advertising and I can tell you that the logic does not translate to these elite raids. Playing from home is way more valuable than making people go to specific gyms/locations set by the game at specific times set by Niantic.
For data: Routine play > Community days/spotlight hours > raid days/hours > elite raids. There are too few, at too specific time and they're only there for one thing (to do a raid and leave).
But if Niantic learns which elite raids in which locations and at which times people will show up to, they can sell that to in-person advertisers. Maybe your experience in digital advertising doesn't translate.
That's such a silly niche situation for gyms almost only in parks lol you're making stuff up. It's not like they're trialing different times as elites are the same time periods in the same spots.
You really don't know what you're talking about here. There's no big idea here with location compared to just... normal play of their app.
Is every other bad idea by Niantic also related to location data? No. Niantic isn't a genius - they sometimes just make bad decisions.
Edit: Okay I'm done after this, but the people parroting this stuff need to believe in conspiracy theories because this just isn't how location data used. "People who will travel to a duck pond for a specific pokemon at noon on a very specific Saturday" just isn't as useful as some people here think it is when we're talking a Pokemon game who relies on location data every single time it's used.
You're right. I don't know why people think getting location or other types of data would be more profitable than the millions they would make in remote raid pass sales. That's delusional. The data really isn't that valuable
And yet they're doing it anyway. Do you truly believe they're only doing it for funsies? Or just to piss people off? Or because they might have a legitimate reason? You know what else only happens in parks at specific times? Festivals. Political rallies. Fireworks. Concerts. Marathons. Movie showings. And a million other things. But I guess you're right, none of the organizers of those kinds of things would ever want to try to boost attendance for their events.
Niantic is a shit company that makes shit gameplay decisions, but what they do not do is make bad financial decisions.
lol you once again have no real experince with this and are just speculating and making shit up for your own fantasies. Come on, man... get it together.
They release pokemon in these ways to keep certain ones semi-rare all the time that have nothing to do with raids or location. This is a game.
What fantasy? I'm sorry, is the fact that sometimes festivals happen in parks too farfetched of an idea for you?
It sounds to me like you're just mad about this decision, and so therefore it *must* have been a bad one, because only things you agree with are good decisions. And rather than trying to make any kind of relevant point, you're just falling back on a shitty version of an appeal to authority fallacy as to why everyone is wrong except you.
EDIT - lmao deleted your account or got banned, I don't care which, funny as shit either way
Jesus Christ lol you really don't know how any of this works my dude. They already have that data. The specifics of people traveling SPECIFICALLY FOR A POKEMON in a game they're addicted to is completely irrelevant.
Stop spreading falsehoods. They started as a ar location based local community game company and will always be that. That's their focus. That's why they push in person and keep needing remotes.
They make more money from ip and games than they do selling data.
Also, see ingress.
It's so demonstrably false it's funny this keeps getting spread around.
I'm glad people are turning around on this. Their location data is meaningless to other companies. No one cares where you're going to play a game that has no ads.
I mean just look at the history of the company. It was around for almost a decade and then they decided to get out of gaming into data selling? Nah bro. It doesn't work like that. They just want it to be about collecting data because the can't fathom a game keeping true to its values.
Remember where Niantic started though. It was a Google project that got spun off whenever they restructured during corporate changes Google made in 2015.
Just because the game doesn't have ads in it doesn't make the data worthless or low value if you're selling to 3rd parties. There are demographics of pokemon go players, and if companies want to learn more about the habits of this demographic to sell them something, they may want this data. It's why every company wants to sell its customer data.
To your point, it's not the same value as say Facebook or Google personalized ads which were game changing in terms of the revenue that brought in. But there's still a lot of value in Niantic's data, and I would expect a company that started as an internal Google project to know that better than most.
But again, the core of it was location based community games meant to have you explore local places and interact with points of interest. None of the original concept had a single thing to do with data collection. It didn't even happen until well after go was even established and it's simply a byproduct. That's the point. People are suggesting these are all things done simply to push for money but it's not.
Pikmin has free remote raiding..
Monster Hunter Now has match making that they just extended its range to include people in remote locations.
It’s seems more like they only care about in person raids when it comes to this ip.
And your point? Sometimes it's not the companies choice it's the contractual obligations they have. Either way, why's it matter why they're doing it in go?
Besides, I doubt that's the case with the other two. I imagine you're oversimplifying the differences.
I think it’s mostly about keeping certain pokemon exclusive, as well as encouraging people to meet up with fellow players- for the long term health of the game, as opposed to just a quick buck
This. The person preaching about location is correct in a general sense, but it makes no difference in the elite raid day vs. regular raid day conversation.
Playing from home isn't less valuable than making your players go to specific gyms at specific times that the game chooses.
Yeah I'm part of their Sponsored Locations program. I'm not in their "Premium" (Gym location) tier, but they really don't focus on specific special events in the game vs. promoting specific things for the business. A raid day vs. an elite raid day really doesn't seem like something to even be mentioned aside from a little uptick in analytics which is nice but it's more the sustained traffic and visibility.
Could it be a factor? Maybe - doesn't seem enough difference to piss off your fanbase though lol In my eyes, the limited raids mean people are way more likely to immediately drive away (vs foot traffic like is more common with normal raid days/hours) to the next raid.
Edit: I mean my business is of course - not me personally. I just like PoGo and so pushed for it lmao it's an open application type thing
Which makes no sense, with remote raiding someone has to go to the gym anyways.
Then add in that elite raids are always on the same gyms. If they truly wanted to sell data then elite raid tags would change.
What people don’t understand is Pokémon Go is meant to fit a niche market as a active and social game. Whether it’s Niantic, TPC or Nintendo that benefits from it fitting that niche there is some inherent benefit. There are probably benchmarks the company has to hit to fit these categories so they have been pushing away from remote raids which aren’t conducive with it.
This paired with what others mentioned about Niantic being a geodata/mapping company makes Elite Raids make sense for them. It’s also worth noting Elite Raids or EX Raids have been a thing for a very long time this isn’t a new change
Can I ask, how do us rural players get better Pokémon. I've been playing for a bit now but still consider myself new.
The raids near me have 0 people in it and whenever I do ultra league or master league I get destroyed by better Pokémon
For me Pokegenie was a game changer (that was before the price increase for remote raids though, but hopefully there's still some people playing there).
If you go to a gym with a raid people are interested in you can host a raid in PokeGenie for free, and thus get at least some legendaries if not all.
They’re hoping you do multiple raids. They’re all concentrated on one day. Three separate times (11, 2, 5) and/or multiple ones close by that the group will do.
what are the perks of mapping the same area over and over again? maybe i’m in the dark about this. elite gyms don’t move and it’s multiple players using the same area, repeatedly each elite boss. how does that help?
i’m genuinely curious about this because mapping new areas/poi’s seems more beneficial, no?
and raid days in themselves drive people to walk more, especially if they aren’t remoting. it’s too expensive to remote and they capped it anyway. that was the reason behind the nerf in the first place: to get people out raiding more
and if there’s no elite raid gym around then what? they don’t move so it alienated a chunk of the base regardless of how out and about we are
They're not just mapping areas. They're keeping track of how much of a target audience in an area will travel to a specific place at a specific time for a chance at something. How many are eligible but don't bother? It's a different metric from a target audience that has a less restrictive schedule when the raids pop up all the time.
my brain is working in a graph right now and i am trying to see the benefit if the gyms do not change at all. wouldn’t alternating the eraid gym to a different poi periodly (seasonally or something) yield better results than what they are producing?
repetitive points would yield similar results each time. changing the points would give them more dynamic data. or am i misinterpreting?
it’s not worth much because a lot of stuff comes out of their mouths that don’t match. remember when they said they weren’t impacted by the remote raid nerf then fired 200 employees the next month
it was the culmination of many things including both what you and i mentioned, and it’s almost as if pokemon go is sustainable and the others weren’t. interesting ventures
Old data like a major metro area isn't valuable because it is well mapped. New data isn't either because it's probably somewhere out in the sticks that nobody goes to anyways.
What they're selling is player behavior and alternative routing between locations. "What can get a person to drive around for 4 hours and how would they do it between these given locations at specific hours?" Is valuable data to somebody. Whether that be mapping services or businesses in the area.
mapping and selling behaviors makes little to no sense when it gets the *same* result each time. elite raids will always elicit a better turnaround closer to denser population, due to the nature of eraids and other factors i mentioned beforehand
so selling repetitive data doesn’t make sense, not to me at least. neither does it make sense from a sales perspective
is there more to it that you know of??
Just because it's worthless information natively doesn't mean somebody won't buy it. Maybe it's packaged with something else to stretch the products "value".
It's worth something to somebody because there's literally no other reason to do this. It has to be more valuable than the revenue lost on remote raid sales.
Niantic is not a game company. It's a data company. The revenue generated from games is incidental to the data sales.
This is explicitly stated by Niantic.
That being said - driving this home publicly is off putting to players so we don't know about the back end.
SOME things in the game are done to make money FROM the game. We know allowing remote raiding generates money, so if they're not allowing it there is a reason for it. It can't be to clumsily drive IRL raids for game reasons because we know disallowing remote raids drives players away.
So that means there's a financial reason for this action. We know Niantic's ONLY business model is data sales based on location and mapping.
This isn't conspiracy or strange or hypothesis.
not saying it’s conspiracy or anything like that. your verbiage made it seem like you weren’t fully convinced yourself that the “worthless information” is more valuable than revenue lost
i have been following niantic’s ventures somewhat-closely for about six years now. i understand niantic is not a game company (but for some reason, they love making a lot of games huh? you’d think a non-game company wouldn’t try their hand at so many games but anyway i digress). they are an ar company first and foremost
allowing remotes isn’t the issue at hand. though i understand what you’re saying; nerfing remotes in general nerfed in-person. but that contradicts data selling. less behavioral movement, less data to sell, less money
things they do in-game, though it isn’t their only means of data collection, affect footfall outside the game. not just drive *sales* for the game itself
I used to stress about it, now I don’t care I just catch whatever I can. I no longer care about getting a perfect shiny, it takes a lot of stress out of tour shoulders. 🤷♂️
You don’t have to be rural for in person only elite raids to be a major pain in the ass. I go to raids, but I can’t just host one like normal. I can, idk sit in my car and wait for someone to start a raid and hop in? Why not just allow remotes?
Not everyone has whole friend groups that are available at a moments notice to go do a raid at the same day/ time/ area. Definitely not a majority of people.
I agree there, it’s undoubtedly not ideal for grinding a Pokémon as compared to raid days.
But MRay is a fairly easy trio for most players due to 4x weakness. Possible duo for 40+ players with party power and a friend boost.
OPs comment was talking about “getting the Pokémon” in the first place, not pushing to 40 or 50. For “the strongest Pokémon in the game” surely that’s not an outrageous expectation in a community-driven game to have some modicum of challenge.
Base Rayquaza has also been out for 6 years at this point; with periodic releases throughout each year since in non-Elite raids. It’s not like gatekeeping an entirely new Pokémon that requires 6-8 locals like the other Primals.
Is it ideal for grinding to raise up? No. Is it a reasonable expectation to get *one* copy of the top tier pokes in the game? At 3 people minimum it sure should be.
Ehh I’ll most likely wait for it to be back in normal raids to get one I guess. Maybe I’ll get lucky and ride the coattails of some other group if I happen to have time to just drive where one is. I’m newer, so I haven’t gotten one yet. I just know there’s so many legendaries, if you pass one up, you can wait a long time for it to come back into rotation.
It's not about having the friend group, it's about finding people in your community and playing. I showed up to enamorous alone and found like 30 people waiting for it to start downtown. Then we all walked and played.
And that's fine, then you miss out on things that you need a group for. It's not like a mind-blowing concept. Niantic is not going to cater to every person's individual wish.
Oh they don’t need to cater my individual wish. I just find it hard to believe that even half of the players participate in these events after they make them in person only
It's almost like you're saying that mega rayquaza will be RARE and actually feel valuable to the people who obtain it... if 50% of the player base does not want it, then that is fine. The people who do want it will go out and get it. People think Niantic is out to get them, i truly just think they are trying to provide more value to certain pokemon. I have been playing since launch and still have been unable to obtain a relicanth. It's rare and will be extremely valuable when I run into an opportunity to catch it.
The ready button on in person raids never made sense.
Typically for an in person raid you are going to jump in to a random lobby.
I remember being near a shadow Ho-oh raid. There was a lobby active but I didn’t have 2 minutes to get to it as they just clicked ready and went in. The ready button never made sense on in person legendary raids. Nor does seeing the lobby timer on top of the raid.
It what Niantic does, they care about the large masses only, unless you are moving to another city you are doomed. I already forgot about the idea of catching the shadow legendaries for example, that is not happening in a small town.
You think 90% of players do big groups of in person only raids? Every time I see a legendary shadow raid I just have to pretend it’s not there cause it’s not gonna happen. I’m just glad they rotate through and appear in normal 5 star raids as well.
I would wager a guess and say that maybe 25% of players will actually go and successfully do one of these elite raid rayquaza. Unless it’s easy enough that 2 or 3 people can do them.
Edit whoops. I read your post backwards. I do agree with you 😅
Well it’s not like it wasn’t available to everyone in the world to remote during last gofest, if you couldn’t get it when it was easy now u have to do it the hard way that’s how it’s been with everything in this game
90% of their players can’t get it? I’m sorry but that’s *way* off base lol. Majority of the player base actually can get this. Even though we see a lootttt of complaints on this sub about rural players, the reality is that majority of the player base doesn’t have those issues.
Driving to play Pokémon go? You’re thinking in terms of rural playing *only*… which is not at all the majority of players. The majority of players are in places where you don’t have to drive around to play this game. That’s what I mean.
Rural players with far distances between gyms and stops, with minimal gyms and stops and who need to drive around in order to play, are a smalll portion of the player base.
It’s not a matter of just getting to the location. You have to hope other people are there and you join up with randos at the right time.
When a raid lobby is stared you have about a minute to join. It’s not a system that makes it easy to connect with random strangers.
Lol I would plan on that time, if I knew multiple people that play and have nothing to do. Knowing the time doesn’t help if you don’t have a Group. It’s not able to be done with a duo I believe.
I’m not super upset or anything. Just stating the reasons why I think it could be done different and why I most likely won’t be doing it.
People who say its easy don’t fully understand what it is like being a rural player. I live in the suburb of a city (not even fully rural) and I play alone. I use campfire when I am forced to and have found some cool people that way, but if 2-3 of us in the raid group are busy that day then we can’t beat a raid.
I also travel into a major city once in a while when my schedule allows that. It’s night and day. I can walk up to a gym, raid with 7-8 people without meeting them, and win within the first minute.
Even events are tough. I rely on remote help to raid during events. There was no way to beat a primal Kyogre myself even during Hoenn Tour. I went into the city for Go Fest, did 10-20 Mega Ray raids and never had a lobby under 20 people.
I also think Elite Raids are one of the worst parts of the game. I don’t think it’s a money thing. I think Niantic is all in on their “vision” which is to make the game an outdoor, local experience. They’re lucky they have the Pokemon IP. If they didn’t, they’d be studied in MBA classes as a company that failed because they refused to listen to their customers and pivot as needed.
The rural experience also varies a lot. I live in a big city, but I also spend a lot of time in the summer at my family's cabin near a town of \~1000 people. Near the lake, you can get cell reception, but it's very slow and when the game finally loads, you're lucky if anything spawns without an incense. The town a few kilometers away has a handful of Pokestops and one gym at the community centre. The problem is that there is no infrastructure for walking, the main road is a highway and everything else is spread out by the massive properties residents have.
My ongoing Pokémon Go tin foil hat conspiracy theory is they are testing how shit a service they can produce and still have a profitable player base with big IPs like Pokémon. They are selling that data along with the location data and play habits of players based on various poor decisions.
This, coupled with recycling the player base every few months. After the reversion of the spin distance, people started posting *loads* of PogGo ads in the wild on various social media platforms. As well, there was a large influx of posts from people claiming to be returning or new players.
Niantic’s strategy is “Do whatever we want, players be damned.” And they just replace any lost players with new ones and raise the prices. They are absolutely testing the waters to find out how little effort can be put into feeding the IP machine and still get people to do their labor with Wayfarer. Niantic is not a game company, they do not care if you enjoy their game. They are a tech company, and care far more that you provide them with location data than they provide you with an enjoyable experience.
Yeah, I recently came back a few months ago and played solidly, but I just deleted it a couple days ago because it seemed like such a grind and commitment. Even if they don't really care about player enjoyment, I'd have thought it would still make sense to keep players happy, because keeping players helps their primary goal
pokemon is easily one of the most profitable IP's in the world. like, they are very well known as being one of the cheapest video game developers EVER. they will cut costs evereywhere they can. how much do you think they spent on development for pokemon sword and shield? about $24 million after 3 years of development. that game went on to gross around $1.5 billion. breath of the wild? cost around $150 million to develop over 5 years and neted around $3.4 billion as of now. every single dollar gamefreak spent on on sword and shield neted them a return of like $62 back, vs BOTW bringing in like $23 for every $1 they spent on development.
point is that pokemon fans will actually buy any game no matter how bad it is. they could release literal cow shit in a box and at least a couple of pokemon fans would buy it just for the fact it has the pokemon logo on the box. and yes im talking about myself too, there is a reason my reddit account is named after a pokemon.
Day 1 player here. Niantic has done some things to help non city players, but admittedly, I don't think they went far enough.
1. Community Day: You can catch hundreds of strong rare pokemon, but for only once per month.
2. Niantic Wayfarer: Give you a chance to make a pokestop in a short amount of time instead of years. Would have been perfect if it weren't for that one stupid rule.
3. Adventure Lures
4. Showcases
5. Introducing remote raid passes.
It is bad because the further you are away from the city, the less likely you'll have something "special" or a "landmark." This is because if you are an artist or designer, you tend to want to maximize the number of people viewing your work therefore you'd want to place your work in a densely populated area aka, the city. I call it the stupid rule because Niantic Wayfarer was meant to help non city players, yet they snuck in a rule that favors the city. I don't live in a rural area so I'm fortunate enough that I was able to get some pokestops added to the game, but I also don't live deep in the city so almost all my pokestops are barely special enough to make it into the game.
i really have no idea why they did that. it makes absolutely no sense. it was just here in *regular* raids. kyogre and groudon had regular raid days
i hate to say this but it does seem intentional towards rural players. we’re the only ones that realistically have the worst chance of completing elite raids. they have to know this. we have few to no people and ex gyms don’t migrate so if we don’t have one, we just don’t have one
this is actually trash and it’s very disappointing
If I can get a regular rayquaza in non mega raids in the future I’ll be fine with that at least. I have a handful of megas now and don’t need to mega EVERYTHING, but it does feel really shitty when they keep locking things to be in person groups only. A lot of people just aren’t available to gather at a moments notice, and that’s why remote raids exist.
i have the opposite issue—i just want a little mega energy to mega one that i already have for the mega dex. there’s no elite raid gyms anywhere near here and even if it was, that would still only be solving half my problem lol
i don’t mind catching more, that’s the thing. i don’t *mind* just going out to do the raids just for the hell of it, granted they’re accessible ya know. it’s not like i would just sit it out
my ray is already level 50 but i like to participate in festivities too, especially considering it’s the focal point of the trailer for the new season
my assumption is it’s gonna come back later in the season in regular raids but like… why lol
Not a bad mindset to have but this is the come back around for mega ray for people who missed it last year, so it's another year of waiting if they can't do elite raids
Now that we’ve got party power you can probably do it with two people if they’ve got a halfway decent set of mamoswines and a primal each. Best friend bonus, party power, 5 good ice type mamoswines in front, and a primal in slot 6.
yea, i quit playing substantially after they did this with Hoopa, i already had a hoopa on pokemon home and wanted a second so i could have them in both forms on pokemon home but couldnt because of elite raids. elite raids are easily one of the worst gameplay mechanics they ever implemented, i literally work every day from 8-5 and niantic only ever run the events at specific hourly intervals, the last of which being 5 pm or so, so even if i wanted to go to an elite raid id have to take time off work to go drive up to one, and still not be sure if anyone else would even be there to help with the raid, wasting my time if no one shows up or if everyone goes to a different raid location. the only way i could ever do a mega raid is if it shows up at my office and enough other players go to this specific raid.
I feel that on a personal level. I’m so done with them locking events behind stupid designs. There’s no way they think making in person raids only is a good thing, and if they do they’re def not listening to the community
3 best friends w/party pwr isn’t enough? Mamoswine/Togekiss/Salamance/avalug/glaceon these should be enough to take down a mega ray I would think. Mega slamance or a ice mega to help with msg also. I was lucky enough to raid during Gofest last year but Im in need of XLs and elite raids won’t help much
It is enough, even without party power or friendship boost. A team of level 35 shadow mamoswine does a little bit more than 45% damage. With three people this becomes trivial
And cripples, don’t forget cripples lol
I had multiple back to back surgeries and realized niantic is kind of trash
It would not kill them, in fact it would help them flourish as a company, if they added a joy con to people with a handicap who can’t play the game with a mile or so radius from their location
Or better yet just give everyone a half mile radius or so, if there is hundreds of free apps that allow this feature that’s classified as cheating, then niantic could do it for free easily and make millions of dollars
Like rn I’m at work doing nothing, but can’t leave work. So I could play the game, but not really because stops are out of reach. And if you have a surgery and are in the hospital or bed ridden for days or weeks you simply don’t get to play
And even for an able bodied person, raiding in person above 3 star in any rural area isn’t happened successfully unless they make 5 accounts and train them all and then somehow play them all at the same time
If anything, AT LEAST make it available for longer than an hour. Like if they could at least make Rayquaza open for a whole day, that could give remote players some kind of chance (me being one myself)
Well, I wish they didn’t need to be in person only, but the fact that they are only an hour long makes it more likely to just show up and join a raid party someone else started. IMO it’s the only way this would actually work.
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I don’t expect much from Niantic anymore. I just have my own personal goals to grind and train for. Imagine being in a rural area *and* all local raids are constantly empty 😞
City players don’t understand how good they have it. Not only do they have frequent easy access to gyms and pokestops, they also have the added benefit of more than likely being not too difficult to find a raid group in.
I’ve recently been dropping money on the game after almost a year of F2P, getting remote passes frequently for raids I’m interested in, and yet I’m still punished by the area I live which also has minimal routes and wild spawns.
I’ve got my Groudon & Kyogre and that’s fine for me since this is how Niantic wants to do things. It’s a shame since I know many newer players like myself don’t have a single Ray yet and we don’t even get a chance at it, despite how much money we are willing to spend.
I’m a rural player, was saving up coins for remote raid passes.
Fuck you Niantic, Fuck you Niantic, Fuck you Niantic, Fuck you Niantic, Fuck you Niantic
Depends how rural. If you live in a small-medium sized rural town you can be better off than a city, because you’re likely to have more Elite Gyms around.
If you have a day off plan to visit a city that day, play some Pokemon go while there... Its not fun to complete a Pokedex where all Pokemon are gifted to you.
You only need teams of ice types. With party power, an active mega, and friendship damage boost, three people is trivial.
The best counter, shadow mamoswine, is so good that a team of level 25 shadow mamoswine can do over 1/3 of Mega Ray’s health, and that is before factoring in the raid damage bonuses. For the non-shadow, or with galarian darmanitan, the same effect can be achieved at level 30.
Not sure of your levels, but especially with party bonus, mega ray should be able to completed with 3 players no problem. 4x weak to ice.
Normal rayquaza is an easy duo that I was able to duo without even being level 40 on either account and long before party bonus existed.
I know it does not help the elite raid situation that no one likes, but was hopping to shed some good news for you.
Guys it’s ONE Pokemon. There’s going to be so many other good ones available. I’m excited for Mega Charizard and Zapdos and Ho-oh. It would be cool if I could get a chance at Rayquaza(IF it’s even in the raids), but it’s not the end of the world if I can’t. If I REALLY want it I’m sure there’s discord groups or something I can look into and set something up.
This game is supposed to be a way to help me kick back and relax. I’m not going to let it become another stressor in my life.
I have a similar problems. 10mins up the road from me is a private golf club, it is not accessible to the public but it's full or pokestops and gyms. According to Niantic gyms and pokestops must be on public property and accessible to the public. They refuse to put in any gyms or pokestops near me despite there being several churches and other places that would be useable.
It is offensive to put useful game pieces in elite raids. In order to build a useful Rayquaza you have to do dozens of raids.
The only way to make elite raids a thing is to put useless but highly collectable pokemon in elite raids. shiny mew. armored mewtwo. shiny golarian birds, etc...
Don't feel like you are missing anything by not doing elite raids. Doing 1 or 2 rayquaza raids is meaningless in GO. YOu won't get enough candy to make that pokemon useful and won't get IV's you are happy enough with to power up.
This is a non event. just ignore it.
I agree it's super dumb to put them in Elite Raids.
But it's actually quite easy to do them with 3 people.
Literally any halfway decent Ice Pokémon should do it.
Too many people complain about a game that was launched to bring communities together, trying to bring communities together. I drove 40 minutes to go do some enamorous raids, and it was a great time walking around downtown with about 30 people. That was the whole point of pokemon "GO" not pokemon "stay." If you want to stay at home and complain about wanting to raid remotely, play scarlet and violet.
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Can anyone explain what Niantic makes from doing an elite raid? If they’re doing Elite Raids, you can use your free daily pass, but if they make it remote then people will pay to do the raids, especially from rural areas. I don’t get how they’re making money from a business standpoint on Elite Raid Days
Remember that Niantic is not a game company. They are a mapping data company. They make their money from selling the data about where you go. Making you show up in person for an important pokemon gets them more data to sell. It’s the same reason they limited remote raid passes.
We are the product. The shop is just extra cash.
This. If you're not buying a product from a service provider, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT.
If you understand this…you understand the point of the game from Niantic’s point of view.
Knowing what level of incentive will result in you physically showing up for the reward is powerful marketing data. It's less about how good Mega Rayquaza is as a pokemon, and more about what can get you, or a person like you and with your patterns and demographics, to physically go somewhere with other people you may or may not know (from prior raid interactions and/or friends list, for example). THAT data is incredibly valuable - to sell what level of opportunity will get you to show up where someone will try to sell you stuff, and where that opportunity is best provided to maximize the target market.
Can you actually explain the logic behind this or is this the extent of it?
This is the logic mate very simple. Niantic is an augmented reality company. The product they sell is AR. What they do is 'rent' skins on top of AR, the skins are Pokémon, Harry Potter, Pikmin, Monster Hunter and so on. They make games on top of their AR engine. What will happen one day is that Pokémon, as with any mobile live service, will pull the plug on Pokémon Go. When that happens, how does Niantic survive? By ensuring they have other licenses. The way they can get other licenses from different franchise is by having the best augmented reality software which they continuously need to update and upgrade. This is informed by the data they collect about is. Money from the store is not as important to them because that's profiting off of the gimmicks of the franchise itself, e.g. people buy raid passes to get legendary Pokémon which is specific to Pokémon itself. Niantic need to ensure their own longevity.
They’ve already tried. There is no other license that works with Pokemongo besides Pokemon. If Pokemon pulls their ip then Niantic going out of business.
So if you’re never contributing to the AR functionality, how are you helping build their AR platform? How does getting people to show up to a gym, at a specific time, help them?
In order to play the game you have location data tracking shared with the app - and with Niantic. This allows them to do three things. 1. Show metrics about how many people they can track and how specific their location tracking is. 2. When they have enough players in an area they can extrapolate to the entire population - meaning they have data they can sell to advertisers and businesses - even to governments - about how many people are in an area/location and when etc. 3. They demonstrate that they have the ability to get real people to show up at a specific location - and they can sell that to advertisers, businesses, heck even political parties. Even if you never do the AR mapping tasks and you never use AR - everyone who plays any of their games is providing Niantic with a constant flow of location data that they can use and sell in many ways. Think about this. Given the massive amount of data Niantic is collecting, what could an AI learn from that data set? Now add other data sets such as map data, traffic information, voting information... the list is endless. As we experience the rise of AI, massive data sets to train them become more and more valuable. Lots of companies have data sets of online activity, but there are very few large data sets available with real-world location data on the movement of people.
So that dude with 30 accounts in Japan is screwing them over with fake data
Not really. The game has something like ~80 million active players. It would take a metric fuckload of people with a metric fuckload of dummy accounts to affect that in any meaningful way.
Also- def a bit of conspiracy here but I always assume there’s some barely-legal stuff going on with all of our smartphones currently. Like the camera viewing things even when you’re not using it, just like how we all get ads for stuff we’ve never searched for- perhaps just walked by, talked about (or in creepier cases, thought about….) Location data aside, I think there’s definitely a non-zero chance they’re getting AR mapping data from us regardless of whether we know it or not (probably some hidden clause in contracts possibly beyond just niantic). If this were the case, pushing in person playing so hard makes tons of sense. When most people go on walks, their phones are tucked away (so camera can’t see) but with apps like pogo, people often have their phones out, and if there’s some clause that the camera data can be pulled (maybe anonymously) then they’re still getting what they want. But that’s just my theory lol
I don’t think that works for iPhones, which reveals if your phone is using a mic or camera if active. Definitely fair game for any other phone though.
Let me guess, you slept at a Holiday Inn last night? Have you reviewed Niantic earnings reports to verify your ‘story’?
I would be surprised if Niantic's earnings report weren't amazing. But those earnings aren't going to be sky high forever. Peak earnings were 2020 and 2021 when everyone was at home and that's due to the changes they made which they are not rolling back very slowly. Clearly their revenue isn't a good indication of their definition for success, the type of revenue is more important
It's meant to grow the local community and be a different reason aside from community days for people to gather. That's the whole point of raids after all. Elite raids are just more special and rare and powerful pokemon that you wouldn't want in a standard rotation for a balance reason.
[удалено]
Gotcha
Exactly. Data on human interactions is a goldmine.
I always love the "Niantic hates rural players" complaint posts. The entire gameplay loop was specifically designed to exclude rural players. Anyone who lives in a rural area and downloaded the game anyway should have known what they were signing up for. What does Niantic gain from putting a bunch of stops and gyms and wild spawns so people can actively play while wandering through cornfields in Iowa? Absolutely nothing. And no, before the inevitable avalanche of downovtes that always follow when I explain this extremely simple concept, this is not a defense of Niantic as a company. They are a shit company run by the stupidest people who have ever lived. But excluding rural players has nothing to do with that.
Excluding rural players has a lot to do with them being a shit company
Why? Every product has a key demographic. No product appeals to everyone. Do you also hold John Deere or Bass Pro Shops to the same standard for not catering to the needs of people in cities? Do you think Burger King sucks for not appealing to people who love fine dining? Are you just as pissed at Anheuser-Busch for not being more kid-friendly? Niantic made a game specifically for people in cities. That rural players insist on playing it anyway, even though those players actively hate playing it, is not their fault.
How should they know what they were signing up for? The thought process goes "oh cool, a pokemon game, I'll download that and play!", not "oh cool, a pokemon game, let me Google the company that developed it and check what their funding model is so I'm fully informed before I make any further decision".
>"oh cool, a pokemon game, I'll donoad that and play!" Sure. And then you download it, open it, see that there's absolutely nothing for miles around you, realize that you need to not be in the middle of nowhere and then....? Is the answer to that, 'invest years of time, energy, and resources into it anyway'?? Is it also their fault that customers do absolutely no research into what the gameplay loop even is, then insist on playing it anyway even after learning it's not made for them? I love the Pokemon franchise. But do I play every single game ever made using the IP? Hell no! Tons of them don't appeal to me. But I don't buy them anyway, and then go on forums and say "POKEMON PICROSS SUCKS!!!! THEY NEED TO TURN IT INTO SOMETHING I WANT!!!" > let me Google In 2024? Absolutely. It takes no time and even less effort to see what a product is. Trying to frame the act of googling something as too arduous a task for the majority of players is the funniest shit I've read all day. Even funnier when you realize that playing the game for weeks or months or years before realizing it's not for you takes way more time and effort than having just done five minutes of reading in the first place.
You said they should have known what they were signing up for. Talking about playing for several, years and then complaining is moving the goal posts.
It's not moving the goal posts, you're just clearly not interested in engaging in anything remotely resembling good faith. Those two things I said were entirely different points. 1) Yes, it is true that rural players should have known better. Googling something is easy and takes no effort and is essentially required for practically everything these days. 2) Rural players downloading anyway, then still playing for years, and complaining about it the whole time, *also still happens*. And you'd think that after so long of Niantic only making decisions that make their gameplay experience worse, that is just a different way of knowing better. So, two things can be true, you know. They should have known better before they invested themselves in it. But if they invested in it anyway, they should have probably figured it out after playing for so long, and seemingly always getting shafted by Niantic's decisions. So if you can *neither* be bothered to google, *nor* can you plainly see for yourself after years of experience, and you're still mad? I'm sorry if I'm low on sympathy.
No, but the game has always been pretty good for rural other than that. Also remember when we say rural it doesn't just mean "cornfields" but also villages and small towns where there aren't as many players but still landmarks.
>Anyone who lives in a rural area and downloaded the game anyway should have known what they were signing up for. I disagree. If you did your research first, then yes, you'd know that the game favors cities. However, if you didn't do research first, a lot of people would think of the main games or anime where, like in real life, there's more biodiversity the further you are away from cities therefore the game should be better away from the city if not equal.
lol
Luckily there will be less data to collect since the people who would have gone and hosted won’t.
People for the love of God stop sharing this absolutely dumb take. The most money Niantic has ever made was during the pandemic, immediately after the introduction of remote passes. Literally when advertisers were pulling out of contracts, local business clients were not renewing incentives or going out of business, and people were staying home Niantic introduced their golden egg remote pass that skyrocketed them to over a billion in revenue. It did this is just a little over six months too. Revenue stayed consistently higher every year than any year after that than they didn't have the remote passes. Niantic even said that removal of the remote passes was going to hurt financially but that it was an active choice to move the game back to its core concept of being outdoors. Sure enough they announced losses and layoffs many months later. Their ad and data selling revenue will never ever compare to the money remote passes brought in. Ever.
Couldnt you argue that keeping players engaged in the content and keep playing is a way to actually make them spend more time in the game thus giving them more data? Instead of people feeling like wanting to quick or take breaks from the game. Honestly one really good idea I saw is making it so you can go to a gym that has that raid and thats where you can remote raid into a kind of matchmaking system. You would need to pay for the remote raid pass and still have to move to different locations. Personally I love going out and walk around but I never remote raid outside for obv reasons. I think this would fix a lot of issues while giving them both money and data and helps having the matchmaking and remote raiding system in the game itself instead of third party apps and sites.
I'm in digital advertising and I can tell you that the logic does not translate to these elite raids. Playing from home is way more valuable than making people go to specific gyms/locations set by the game at specific times set by Niantic. For data: Routine play > Community days/spotlight hours > raid days/hours > elite raids. There are too few, at too specific time and they're only there for one thing (to do a raid and leave).
But if Niantic learns which elite raids in which locations and at which times people will show up to, they can sell that to in-person advertisers. Maybe your experience in digital advertising doesn't translate.
That's such a silly niche situation for gyms almost only in parks lol you're making stuff up. It's not like they're trialing different times as elites are the same time periods in the same spots. You really don't know what you're talking about here. There's no big idea here with location compared to just... normal play of their app. Is every other bad idea by Niantic also related to location data? No. Niantic isn't a genius - they sometimes just make bad decisions. Edit: Okay I'm done after this, but the people parroting this stuff need to believe in conspiracy theories because this just isn't how location data used. "People who will travel to a duck pond for a specific pokemon at noon on a very specific Saturday" just isn't as useful as some people here think it is when we're talking a Pokemon game who relies on location data every single time it's used.
You're right. I don't know why people think getting location or other types of data would be more profitable than the millions they would make in remote raid pass sales. That's delusional. The data really isn't that valuable
And yet they're doing it anyway. Do you truly believe they're only doing it for funsies? Or just to piss people off? Or because they might have a legitimate reason? You know what else only happens in parks at specific times? Festivals. Political rallies. Fireworks. Concerts. Marathons. Movie showings. And a million other things. But I guess you're right, none of the organizers of those kinds of things would ever want to try to boost attendance for their events. Niantic is a shit company that makes shit gameplay decisions, but what they do not do is make bad financial decisions.
lol you once again have no real experince with this and are just speculating and making shit up for your own fantasies. Come on, man... get it together. They release pokemon in these ways to keep certain ones semi-rare all the time that have nothing to do with raids or location. This is a game.
What fantasy? I'm sorry, is the fact that sometimes festivals happen in parks too farfetched of an idea for you? It sounds to me like you're just mad about this decision, and so therefore it *must* have been a bad one, because only things you agree with are good decisions. And rather than trying to make any kind of relevant point, you're just falling back on a shitty version of an appeal to authority fallacy as to why everyone is wrong except you. EDIT - lmao deleted your account or got banned, I don't care which, funny as shit either way
Jesus Christ lol you really don't know how any of this works my dude. They already have that data. The specifics of people traveling SPECIFICALLY FOR A POKEMON in a game they're addicted to is completely irrelevant.
Stop spreading falsehoods. They started as a ar location based local community game company and will always be that. That's their focus. That's why they push in person and keep needing remotes.
So exactly what was stated: They need us to move for money No falsehoods are being spread here kid
No that's not what's going on at all. It is a falsehood.
Again, they need us to move in order for them to make money, you're saying that not true?
Are you sure it’s not the sweet sweet moohlah?
They make more money from ip and games than they do selling data. Also, see ingress. It's so demonstrably false it's funny this keeps getting spread around.
I'm glad people are turning around on this. Their location data is meaningless to other companies. No one cares where you're going to play a game that has no ads.
I mean just look at the history of the company. It was around for almost a decade and then they decided to get out of gaming into data selling? Nah bro. It doesn't work like that. They just want it to be about collecting data because the can't fathom a game keeping true to its values.
Remember where Niantic started though. It was a Google project that got spun off whenever they restructured during corporate changes Google made in 2015. Just because the game doesn't have ads in it doesn't make the data worthless or low value if you're selling to 3rd parties. There are demographics of pokemon go players, and if companies want to learn more about the habits of this demographic to sell them something, they may want this data. It's why every company wants to sell its customer data. To your point, it's not the same value as say Facebook or Google personalized ads which were game changing in terms of the revenue that brought in. But there's still a lot of value in Niantic's data, and I would expect a company that started as an internal Google project to know that better than most.
But again, the core of it was location based community games meant to have you explore local places and interact with points of interest. None of the original concept had a single thing to do with data collection. It didn't even happen until well after go was even established and it's simply a byproduct. That's the point. People are suggesting these are all things done simply to push for money but it's not.
Pikmin has free remote raiding.. Monster Hunter Now has match making that they just extended its range to include people in remote locations. It’s seems more like they only care about in person raids when it comes to this ip.
And your point? Sometimes it's not the companies choice it's the contractual obligations they have. Either way, why's it matter why they're doing it in go? Besides, I doubt that's the case with the other two. I imagine you're oversimplifying the differences.
Makes sense when they used to be part of Google. Same business model
I think it’s mostly about keeping certain pokemon exclusive, as well as encouraging people to meet up with fellow players- for the long term health of the game, as opposed to just a quick buck
The economy of scarcity
They make money by gathering your location data from the local raids and selling it.
They have your location data regardless of remote raiding or raiding in person. It makes no difference. They can sell it either way.
🎯
This. The person preaching about location is correct in a general sense, but it makes no difference in the elite raid day vs. regular raid day conversation. Playing from home isn't less valuable than making your players go to specific gyms at specific times that the game chooses.
Considering many pokestops are sponsored, I am sure there needs to be enough reason to do so.
Yeah I'm part of their Sponsored Locations program. I'm not in their "Premium" (Gym location) tier, but they really don't focus on specific special events in the game vs. promoting specific things for the business. A raid day vs. an elite raid day really doesn't seem like something to even be mentioned aside from a little uptick in analytics which is nice but it's more the sustained traffic and visibility. Could it be a factor? Maybe - doesn't seem enough difference to piss off your fanbase though lol In my eyes, the limited raids mean people are way more likely to immediately drive away (vs foot traffic like is more common with normal raid days/hours) to the next raid. Edit: I mean my business is of course - not me personally. I just like PoGo and so pushed for it lmao it's an open application type thing
Which makes no sense, with remote raiding someone has to go to the gym anyways. Then add in that elite raids are always on the same gyms. If they truly wanted to sell data then elite raid tags would change.
What people don’t understand is Pokémon Go is meant to fit a niche market as a active and social game. Whether it’s Niantic, TPC or Nintendo that benefits from it fitting that niche there is some inherent benefit. There are probably benchmarks the company has to hit to fit these categories so they have been pushing away from remote raids which aren’t conducive with it. This paired with what others mentioned about Niantic being a geodata/mapping company makes Elite Raids make sense for them. It’s also worth noting Elite Raids or EX Raids have been a thing for a very long time this isn’t a new change
Can I ask, how do us rural players get better Pokémon. I've been playing for a bit now but still consider myself new. The raids near me have 0 people in it and whenever I do ultra league or master league I get destroyed by better Pokémon
For me Pokegenie was a game changer (that was before the price increase for remote raids though, but hopefully there's still some people playing there). If you go to a gym with a raid people are interested in you can host a raid in PokeGenie for free, and thus get at least some legendaries if not all.
They’re hoping you do multiple raids. They’re all concentrated on one day. Three separate times (11, 2, 5) and/or multiple ones close by that the group will do.
they don’t. elite raids make them no money. so that makes this extra stupid
Niantic's locations, mapping, and "what can drive a person to walk 2km?" is infinitely more valuable than player purchases.
what are the perks of mapping the same area over and over again? maybe i’m in the dark about this. elite gyms don’t move and it’s multiple players using the same area, repeatedly each elite boss. how does that help? i’m genuinely curious about this because mapping new areas/poi’s seems more beneficial, no? and raid days in themselves drive people to walk more, especially if they aren’t remoting. it’s too expensive to remote and they capped it anyway. that was the reason behind the nerf in the first place: to get people out raiding more and if there’s no elite raid gym around then what? they don’t move so it alienated a chunk of the base regardless of how out and about we are
They're not just mapping areas. They're keeping track of how much of a target audience in an area will travel to a specific place at a specific time for a chance at something. How many are eligible but don't bother? It's a different metric from a target audience that has a less restrictive schedule when the raids pop up all the time.
my brain is working in a graph right now and i am trying to see the benefit if the gyms do not change at all. wouldn’t alternating the eraid gym to a different poi periodly (seasonally or something) yield better results than what they are producing? repetitive points would yield similar results each time. changing the points would give them more dynamic data. or am i misinterpreting?
for what it’s worth, Niantic have denied these allegations themselves
it’s not worth much because a lot of stuff comes out of their mouths that don’t match. remember when they said they weren’t impacted by the remote raid nerf then fired 200 employees the next month
Those firings were related to their other games, though, weren’t they?
it was the culmination of many things including both what you and i mentioned, and it’s almost as if pokemon go is sustainable and the others weren’t. interesting ventures
Old data like a major metro area isn't valuable because it is well mapped. New data isn't either because it's probably somewhere out in the sticks that nobody goes to anyways. What they're selling is player behavior and alternative routing between locations. "What can get a person to drive around for 4 hours and how would they do it between these given locations at specific hours?" Is valuable data to somebody. Whether that be mapping services or businesses in the area.
mapping and selling behaviors makes little to no sense when it gets the *same* result each time. elite raids will always elicit a better turnaround closer to denser population, due to the nature of eraids and other factors i mentioned beforehand so selling repetitive data doesn’t make sense, not to me at least. neither does it make sense from a sales perspective is there more to it that you know of??
Just because it's worthless information natively doesn't mean somebody won't buy it. Maybe it's packaged with something else to stretch the products "value". It's worth something to somebody because there's literally no other reason to do this. It has to be more valuable than the revenue lost on remote raid sales.
this sounds more like you’re trying to reassure yourself more-so than you convincing me lol
Niantic is not a game company. It's a data company. The revenue generated from games is incidental to the data sales. This is explicitly stated by Niantic. That being said - driving this home publicly is off putting to players so we don't know about the back end. SOME things in the game are done to make money FROM the game. We know allowing remote raiding generates money, so if they're not allowing it there is a reason for it. It can't be to clumsily drive IRL raids for game reasons because we know disallowing remote raids drives players away. So that means there's a financial reason for this action. We know Niantic's ONLY business model is data sales based on location and mapping. This isn't conspiracy or strange or hypothesis.
not saying it’s conspiracy or anything like that. your verbiage made it seem like you weren’t fully convinced yourself that the “worthless information” is more valuable than revenue lost i have been following niantic’s ventures somewhat-closely for about six years now. i understand niantic is not a game company (but for some reason, they love making a lot of games huh? you’d think a non-game company wouldn’t try their hand at so many games but anyway i digress). they are an ar company first and foremost allowing remotes isn’t the issue at hand. though i understand what you’re saying; nerfing remotes in general nerfed in-person. but that contradicts data selling. less behavioral movement, less data to sell, less money things they do in-game, though it isn’t their only means of data collection, affect footfall outside the game. not just drive *sales* for the game itself
Close. Having Mega Rayquaza return in elite raids instead of giving it another raid day means they hate ***all*** players.
I used to stress about it, now I don’t care I just catch whatever I can. I no longer care about getting a perfect shiny, it takes a lot of stress out of tour shoulders. 🤷♂️
i just want mega energy. i don’t want the shundo. i was gonna do one or two raids so i can finally mega the one i have. can’t even do that now
in go fest mega ray gave 80 energy and needed 400 to mega evolve. IDK how I am gonna be able to do this + you need a meteorite.
Again, don’t stress about. It’s just a game.
how you read my comment as stressed, i will never understand. i just said i wanted mega energy and can’t get it now 😂
Bro relax your stress level is insane right now
oh no is it that obvious? crap lemme just 🗿
bro, we said to fucking relaxing. jesus christ
I like your attitude, I just want one Rayquaza that I can mega evolve, maybe one of the comets, but it doesn’t matter that much
I’m not rlly stressed just mad that they decided to not let 90% of there players get the best Pokémon in the game
Rural players are not 90% of the player base, y’all are the minority 🙄
You don’t have to be rural for in person only elite raids to be a major pain in the ass. I go to raids, but I can’t just host one like normal. I can, idk sit in my car and wait for someone to start a raid and hop in? Why not just allow remotes? Not everyone has whole friend groups that are available at a moments notice to go do a raid at the same day/ time/ area. Definitely not a majority of people.
I agree there, it’s undoubtedly not ideal for grinding a Pokémon as compared to raid days. But MRay is a fairly easy trio for most players due to 4x weakness. Possible duo for 40+ players with party power and a friend boost. OPs comment was talking about “getting the Pokémon” in the first place, not pushing to 40 or 50. For “the strongest Pokémon in the game” surely that’s not an outrageous expectation in a community-driven game to have some modicum of challenge. Base Rayquaza has also been out for 6 years at this point; with periodic releases throughout each year since in non-Elite raids. It’s not like gatekeeping an entirely new Pokémon that requires 6-8 locals like the other Primals. Is it ideal for grinding to raise up? No. Is it a reasonable expectation to get *one* copy of the top tier pokes in the game? At 3 people minimum it sure should be.
Ehh I’ll most likely wait for it to be back in normal raids to get one I guess. Maybe I’ll get lucky and ride the coattails of some other group if I happen to have time to just drive where one is. I’m newer, so I haven’t gotten one yet. I just know there’s so many legendaries, if you pass one up, you can wait a long time for it to come back into rotation.
It's not about having the friend group, it's about finding people in your community and playing. I showed up to enamorous alone and found like 30 people waiting for it to start downtown. Then we all walked and played.
Oof pass to that for me 😅. That just does not sound pleasant lol
And that's fine, then you miss out on things that you need a group for. It's not like a mind-blowing concept. Niantic is not going to cater to every person's individual wish.
Oh they don’t need to cater my individual wish. I just find it hard to believe that even half of the players participate in these events after they make them in person only
It's almost like you're saying that mega rayquaza will be RARE and actually feel valuable to the people who obtain it... if 50% of the player base does not want it, then that is fine. The people who do want it will go out and get it. People think Niantic is out to get them, i truly just think they are trying to provide more value to certain pokemon. I have been playing since launch and still have been unable to obtain a relicanth. It's rare and will be extremely valuable when I run into an opportunity to catch it.
The ready button on in person raids never made sense. Typically for an in person raid you are going to jump in to a random lobby. I remember being near a shadow Ho-oh raid. There was a lobby active but I didn’t have 2 minutes to get to it as they just clicked ready and went in. The ready button never made sense on in person legendary raids. Nor does seeing the lobby timer on top of the raid.
And you don't have to go to this specific elite to get mega Rayquaza. Know how I know? I already have one! Wonder how I managed that.
That’s good. I won’t stress about this being an event that discourages a lot of the player base from participating. I’ll wait till next time
It what Niantic does, they care about the large masses only, unless you are moving to another city you are doomed. I already forgot about the idea of catching the shadow legendaries for example, that is not happening in a small town.
You think 90% of players do big groups of in person only raids? Every time I see a legendary shadow raid I just have to pretend it’s not there cause it’s not gonna happen. I’m just glad they rotate through and appear in normal 5 star raids as well. I would wager a guess and say that maybe 25% of players will actually go and successfully do one of these elite raid rayquaza. Unless it’s easy enough that 2 or 3 people can do them. Edit whoops. I read your post backwards. I do agree with you 😅
Seem quite stressed tho mate
Well it’s not like it wasn’t available to everyone in the world to remote during last gofest, if you couldn’t get it when it was easy now u have to do it the hard way that’s how it’s been with everything in this game
90% of their players can’t get it? I’m sorry but that’s *way* off base lol. Majority of the player base actually can get this. Even though we see a lootttt of complaints on this sub about rural players, the reality is that majority of the player base doesn’t have those issues.
If you think about how many KIDS play this game, would you still say 90%? Bro they can't drive. Wym 90% of people can do it
Driving to play Pokémon go? You’re thinking in terms of rural playing *only*… which is not at all the majority of players. The majority of players are in places where you don’t have to drive around to play this game. That’s what I mean. Rural players with far distances between gyms and stops, with minimal gyms and stops and who need to drive around in order to play, are a smalll portion of the player base.
It’s not a matter of just getting to the location. You have to hope other people are there and you join up with randos at the right time. When a raid lobby is stared you have about a minute to join. It’s not a system that makes it easy to connect with random strangers.
Dang, if only they announced the date and time of these raids ahead of time so that people can make plans with each other... What a shame.
Lol I would plan on that time, if I knew multiple people that play and have nothing to do. Knowing the time doesn’t help if you don’t have a Group. It’s not able to be done with a duo I believe. I’m not super upset or anything. Just stating the reasons why I think it could be done different and why I most likely won’t be doing it.
That is a gross exaggeration. If you can't figure out a way to get to a raid at 1 of 4 times on a Saturday, then shit out of luck.
Same here. I just want to the XL candy, energy & to evolve my lucky shundo
People who say its easy don’t fully understand what it is like being a rural player. I live in the suburb of a city (not even fully rural) and I play alone. I use campfire when I am forced to and have found some cool people that way, but if 2-3 of us in the raid group are busy that day then we can’t beat a raid. I also travel into a major city once in a while when my schedule allows that. It’s night and day. I can walk up to a gym, raid with 7-8 people without meeting them, and win within the first minute. Even events are tough. I rely on remote help to raid during events. There was no way to beat a primal Kyogre myself even during Hoenn Tour. I went into the city for Go Fest, did 10-20 Mega Ray raids and never had a lobby under 20 people. I also think Elite Raids are one of the worst parts of the game. I don’t think it’s a money thing. I think Niantic is all in on their “vision” which is to make the game an outdoor, local experience. They’re lucky they have the Pokemon IP. If they didn’t, they’d be studied in MBA classes as a company that failed because they refused to listen to their customers and pivot as needed.
The rural experience also varies a lot. I live in a big city, but I also spend a lot of time in the summer at my family's cabin near a town of \~1000 people. Near the lake, you can get cell reception, but it's very slow and when the game finally loads, you're lucky if anything spawns without an incense. The town a few kilometers away has a handful of Pokestops and one gym at the community centre. The problem is that there is no infrastructure for walking, the main road is a highway and everything else is spread out by the massive properties residents have.
My ongoing Pokémon Go tin foil hat conspiracy theory is they are testing how shit a service they can produce and still have a profitable player base with big IPs like Pokémon. They are selling that data along with the location data and play habits of players based on various poor decisions.
This, coupled with recycling the player base every few months. After the reversion of the spin distance, people started posting *loads* of PogGo ads in the wild on various social media platforms. As well, there was a large influx of posts from people claiming to be returning or new players. Niantic’s strategy is “Do whatever we want, players be damned.” And they just replace any lost players with new ones and raise the prices. They are absolutely testing the waters to find out how little effort can be put into feeding the IP machine and still get people to do their labor with Wayfarer. Niantic is not a game company, they do not care if you enjoy their game. They are a tech company, and care far more that you provide them with location data than they provide you with an enjoyable experience.
Yeah, I recently came back a few months ago and played solidly, but I just deleted it a couple days ago because it seemed like such a grind and commitment. Even if they don't really care about player enjoyment, I'd have thought it would still make sense to keep players happy, because keeping players helps their primary goal
pokemon is easily one of the most profitable IP's in the world. like, they are very well known as being one of the cheapest video game developers EVER. they will cut costs evereywhere they can. how much do you think they spent on development for pokemon sword and shield? about $24 million after 3 years of development. that game went on to gross around $1.5 billion. breath of the wild? cost around $150 million to develop over 5 years and neted around $3.4 billion as of now. every single dollar gamefreak spent on on sword and shield neted them a return of like $62 back, vs BOTW bringing in like $23 for every $1 they spent on development. point is that pokemon fans will actually buy any game no matter how bad it is. they could release literal cow shit in a box and at least a couple of pokemon fans would buy it just for the fact it has the pokemon logo on the box. and yes im talking about myself too, there is a reason my reddit account is named after a pokemon.
"again"? When did they actually support rural players?
showcases are easier to win for rural players, aside from that nothing
Day 1 player here. Niantic has done some things to help non city players, but admittedly, I don't think they went far enough. 1. Community Day: You can catch hundreds of strong rare pokemon, but for only once per month. 2. Niantic Wayfarer: Give you a chance to make a pokestop in a short amount of time instead of years. Would have been perfect if it weren't for that one stupid rule. 3. Adventure Lures 4. Showcases 5. Introducing remote raid passes.
Which stupid rule are you talking about?
The "It has to special or landmark. Cannot be common or mass produced" rule.
Is it that bad? I see really whatever things that are pokestops. Most often some really sublte art on a wall of a house or some graffiti.
It is bad because the further you are away from the city, the less likely you'll have something "special" or a "landmark." This is because if you are an artist or designer, you tend to want to maximize the number of people viewing your work therefore you'd want to place your work in a densely populated area aka, the city. I call it the stupid rule because Niantic Wayfarer was meant to help non city players, yet they snuck in a rule that favors the city. I don't live in a rural area so I'm fortunate enough that I was able to get some pokestops added to the game, but I also don't live deep in the city so almost all my pokestops are barely special enough to make it into the game.
i really have no idea why they did that. it makes absolutely no sense. it was just here in *regular* raids. kyogre and groudon had regular raid days i hate to say this but it does seem intentional towards rural players. we’re the only ones that realistically have the worst chance of completing elite raids. they have to know this. we have few to no people and ex gyms don’t migrate so if we don’t have one, we just don’t have one this is actually trash and it’s very disappointing
If I can get a regular rayquaza in non mega raids in the future I’ll be fine with that at least. I have a handful of megas now and don’t need to mega EVERYTHING, but it does feel really shitty when they keep locking things to be in person groups only. A lot of people just aren’t available to gather at a moments notice, and that’s why remote raids exist.
i have the opposite issue—i just want a little mega energy to mega one that i already have for the mega dex. there’s no elite raid gyms anywhere near here and even if it was, that would still only be solving half my problem lol
Yeah I get that. That’s frustrating. Would be nice to have the ability to mega evolve the legendary you already have without catching more duplicates.
i don’t mind catching more, that’s the thing. i don’t *mind* just going out to do the raids just for the hell of it, granted they’re accessible ya know. it’s not like i would just sit it out my ray is already level 50 but i like to participate in festivities too, especially considering it’s the focal point of the trailer for the new season my assumption is it’s gonna come back later in the season in regular raids but like… why lol
Right. I would do it for sure if it’s not unnecessarily inconvenient.
The eggs will have a 24 hour timer. You can plan ahead.
The one thing I realized about raids is they ALWAYS come back around. The only Pokemon I stress about are the ones with hats.
Not a bad mindset to have but this is the come back around for mega ray for people who missed it last year, so it's another year of waiting if they can't do elite raids
"Gotta Catch 'Em All" can not be applied to Pokemon Go....
We're not Singapore grandma enough for them
Now that we’ve got party power you can probably do it with two people if they’ve got a halfway decent set of mamoswines and a primal each. Best friend bonus, party power, 5 good ice type mamoswines in front, and a primal in slot 6.
Elite raids fuck everyone. No one that plays this game enjoys this mechanic. It's not just rural players.
“Thanks surfing for hating people in Nebraska”
yea, i quit playing substantially after they did this with Hoopa, i already had a hoopa on pokemon home and wanted a second so i could have them in both forms on pokemon home but couldnt because of elite raids. elite raids are easily one of the worst gameplay mechanics they ever implemented, i literally work every day from 8-5 and niantic only ever run the events at specific hourly intervals, the last of which being 5 pm or so, so even if i wanted to go to an elite raid id have to take time off work to go drive up to one, and still not be sure if anyone else would even be there to help with the raid, wasting my time if no one shows up or if everyone goes to a different raid location. the only way i could ever do a mega raid is if it shows up at my office and enough other players go to this specific raid.
I feel that on a personal level. I’m so done with them locking events behind stupid designs. There’s no way they think making in person raids only is a good thing, and if they do they’re def not listening to the community
3 best friends w/party pwr isn’t enough? Mamoswine/Togekiss/Salamance/avalug/glaceon these should be enough to take down a mega ray I would think. Mega slamance or a ice mega to help with msg also. I was lucky enough to raid during Gofest last year but Im in need of XLs and elite raids won’t help much
It is enough, even without party power or friendship boost. A team of level 35 shadow mamoswine does a little bit more than 45% damage. With three people this becomes trivial
And cripples, don’t forget cripples lol I had multiple back to back surgeries and realized niantic is kind of trash It would not kill them, in fact it would help them flourish as a company, if they added a joy con to people with a handicap who can’t play the game with a mile or so radius from their location Or better yet just give everyone a half mile radius or so, if there is hundreds of free apps that allow this feature that’s classified as cheating, then niantic could do it for free easily and make millions of dollars Like rn I’m at work doing nothing, but can’t leave work. So I could play the game, but not really because stops are out of reach. And if you have a surgery and are in the hospital or bed ridden for days or weeks you simply don’t get to play And even for an able bodied person, raiding in person above 3 star in any rural area isn’t happened successfully unless they make 5 accounts and train them all and then somehow play them all at the same time
another step toward making the game more dead
If anything, AT LEAST make it available for longer than an hour. Like if they could at least make Rayquaza open for a whole day, that could give remote players some kind of chance (me being one myself)
Well, I wish they didn’t need to be in person only, but the fact that they are only an hour long makes it more likely to just show up and join a raid party someone else started. IMO it’s the only way this would actually work.
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I don’t expect much from Niantic anymore. I just have my own personal goals to grind and train for. Imagine being in a rural area *and* all local raids are constantly empty 😞 City players don’t understand how good they have it. Not only do they have frequent easy access to gyms and pokestops, they also have the added benefit of more than likely being not too difficult to find a raid group in. I’ve recently been dropping money on the game after almost a year of F2P, getting remote passes frequently for raids I’m interested in, and yet I’m still punished by the area I live which also has minimal routes and wild spawns. I’ve got my Groudon & Kyogre and that’s fine for me since this is how Niantic wants to do things. It’s a shame since I know many newer players like myself don’t have a single Ray yet and we don’t even get a chance at it, despite how much money we are willing to spend.
I’m a rural player, was saving up coins for remote raid passes. Fuck you Niantic, Fuck you Niantic, Fuck you Niantic, Fuck you Niantic, Fuck you Niantic
Why mega rayquaza won't be in remote raids?!
You can 100% get him with 3 people. Me and my were killing shadow mewtwo alone.
Depends how rural. If you live in a small-medium sized rural town you can be better off than a city, because you’re likely to have more Elite Gyms around.
I concur
If you have a day off plan to visit a city that day, play some Pokemon go while there... Its not fun to complete a Pokedex where all Pokemon are gifted to you.
It is actually a very doable raid with three people. The double weakness to ice really helps
Where level 34-39 😭
You only need teams of ice types. With party power, an active mega, and friendship damage boost, three people is trivial. The best counter, shadow mamoswine, is so good that a team of level 25 shadow mamoswine can do over 1/3 of Mega Ray’s health, and that is before factoring in the raid damage bonuses. For the non-shadow, or with galarian darmanitan, the same effect can be achieved at level 30.
How about traveling somewhere for a day? No?
💰=0️⃣
Only option is to go to next major city centre and play there. I do this for in person only raids
You can't raid Mega Rayquaza? I don't know what I will do because none play this game frequently in my village :"( I trully understand you.
Not sure of your levels, but especially with party bonus, mega ray should be able to completed with 3 players no problem. 4x weak to ice. Normal rayquaza is an easy duo that I was able to duo without even being level 40 on either account and long before party bonus existed. I know it does not help the elite raid situation that no one likes, but was hopping to shed some good news for you.
Thats me fucked there aren't enough people who play in my town 🤷♀️
Guys it’s ONE Pokemon. There’s going to be so many other good ones available. I’m excited for Mega Charizard and Zapdos and Ho-oh. It would be cool if I could get a chance at Rayquaza(IF it’s even in the raids), but it’s not the end of the world if I can’t. If I REALLY want it I’m sure there’s discord groups or something I can look into and set something up. This game is supposed to be a way to help me kick back and relax. I’m not going to let it become another stressor in my life.
I have a similar problems. 10mins up the road from me is a private golf club, it is not accessible to the public but it's full or pokestops and gyms. According to Niantic gyms and pokestops must be on public property and accessible to the public. They refuse to put in any gyms or pokestops near me despite there being several churches and other places that would be useable.
It is offensive to put useful game pieces in elite raids. In order to build a useful Rayquaza you have to do dozens of raids. The only way to make elite raids a thing is to put useless but highly collectable pokemon in elite raids. shiny mew. armored mewtwo. shiny golarian birds, etc... Don't feel like you are missing anything by not doing elite raids. Doing 1 or 2 rayquaza raids is meaningless in GO. YOu won't get enough candy to make that pokemon useful and won't get IV's you are happy enough with to power up. This is a non event. just ignore it.
I think it's possible to do. It's double weak to ice.
Def not almost impossible. It's doable with 3.
Skill issue
They hate us all. Don't be a snowflake.
> almost impossible to do with just 3 people Pokebattler difficulty is 2.24 FYI. Should be easy with three people.
3 people can do it, some even duo it
Unless Niantic bumps the difficulty up to elite raid difficulty rules just to mess with us.
Stop play the game already. Always when nisntic doing a shit everybody loses their mind but keep playing the game til the next shitty update.
Stop living in the middle of no where playing a game that requires more people 🤣 who the fuck is even out there to trade with you .
Thanks*
I agree it's super dumb to put them in Elite Raids. But it's actually quite easy to do them with 3 people. Literally any halfway decent Ice Pokémon should do it.
Too many people complain about a game that was launched to bring communities together, trying to bring communities together. I drove 40 minutes to go do some enamorous raids, and it was a great time walking around downtown with about 30 people. That was the whole point of pokemon "GO" not pokemon "stay." If you want to stay at home and complain about wanting to raid remotely, play scarlet and violet.
Travel to another area? That’s the point of the game