Released around a week ago, Pokémon Champions is a standalone free to start Pokémon game, focused on online competitive ranked battles.
In a lot of ways, the game makes the world of competitive Pokémon battling more accessible than it has historically been. The pool of Pokémon and Items available at launch is deliberately small to reduce the barrier to entry, the power level of the format is being kept deliberately low, there’s decently detailed tutorials available in game, and information communication to the player is far more clear than past series entries.
However, one concern players had prior to the game’s release was whether the free to start business model would be employed in a predatory manner, or if it would be handled in a healthy way.
As someone who has a number of disabilities impacting my impulse control, I’m often the exact kind of disabled player that predatory monetisation preys upon. I’ve in the past had to completely quit playing certain games because I found myself too easily drawn to spending money beyond my means. As such, I was deeply curious if I would be able to fall in love with Pokémon Champions, or if I would have to quickly stop playing it, as I did with the highly predatory release of Pokémon Unite.
I’m excited to say that, while there are ways to spend money on Pokemon Champions, the monetisation is implemented in such a way that there is a hard limit on how much a player could spend per month on the game, and that limit is pretty low. Most of the areas that other free to start games would use to drive impulsive repeat payments are impossible to spend money on, and at least at launch I feel confident saying that Pokémon Champions’ business model is not exploitative.
So, let’s start with what you can pay for.
The Pokémon Champions Starter Pack costs £5.99, and can only be purchased a single time. There is no ability to purchase this more than once. The starter pack contains 30 Teammate Tickets and 50 Training Tickets, alongside increasing your Pokémon box storage space by 50 slots, and coming with one new battle theme to listen to in combat.
Let’s firstly talk about Teammate Tickets, and Pokémon Recruitment. Every 22 hours players can see a new roster of ten random Pokémon. From this lineup of 10 players can recruit one Pokémon. A one week trial rental is free, with permanent recruitment costing 2,500 VP (Victory Points), or one Teammate Ticket.
Victory Points cannot be directly purchased in any way. The average online ranked match rewards 300 VP, meaning that around 8 matches are needed to purchase a permanent new Pokémon. You get 30 permanent recruitment tickets with the starter pack.
VP are also used to change a Pokémon’s stats, ability, nature, and moveset. To fully train a Pokémon, changing every one of their categories completely, would cost around 2,500 VP, or again around 8 online matches. The starter pack gives you 50 training tickets, each allowing for a Pokémon to be fully customised without spending VP.
The starter pack cannot be purchased more than once. There is no mechanism for a player to repeatedly and directly purchase Training or Recruitment tickets. If they run out, they’re realistically going to need to earn VP by playing matches online to continue recruiting or training more Pokémon.
Basically, the only real way to do those things is by playing the game.
Beyond that, Pokémon Champions has two monthly payment options available to players, the Premium Battle Pass and a monthly Membership.
The Premium Battle Pass costs £7.99, and its contents can be seen in advance. Players who complete the season one Battle Pass (the first one that we’re able to see, which is fairly easy to do in average play) will gain access to an Emboar and a Feraligator permanently recruited (without having to find them in the recruitment menu randomly and recruit them with VP). They’ll also get their Mega Stones (which can be purchased with VP in the in game currency store), as well as a handful of cosmetics, and a handful of recruitment and training tickets.
The Subscription, which costs £4.19 per month, increases the players box spaces by 1,000, allows for 15 battle teams to be saved at one time, provides additional missions, and a handful of additional music tracks. This is very much designed for high end competetive players who are planning on competing at the top end of the metagame, and want a whole bunch of competetive teams on the go at once. It’s very much unnecessary for most people, and doesn’t offer any degree of faster access to Pokémon, or additional VP (at least not directly), or any additional training or recruitment tickets. It does provide additional missions which may unlock VP or tickets as rewards, but this information is not directly advertised to the player, and is kind of shoved to one side a bit.
If someone were to spend the maximum possible amount of money playing Pokémon Champions, they would spend £18.17 at launch, and £12.18 per month in subsequent months. As far as free to start games go, that’s a decently low top end ceiling.
More realistically, I think that someone who felt compelled by completionism to make purchases that speed up their experience and helped them not miss out on optional extras would likely spend a £5.99 one time fee, and £7.99 monthly on this game. In the free to start game space that’s a fairly low and predictable price, with basically zero ability for someone addicted to playing to compulsively dump their whole bank account into the game.
There is no repeatable purchase you can just sit and make again and again, because you’ve run out of a currency and you want to spam it.
In terms of areas of the game that I expected to be monetised but are not, early refreshing of your Pokémon for recruitment can only be done via VP, or “Quick Tickets”. Neither of these can be directly purchased, requiring players to take part in online matches to unlock them. There is no way for a player to directly spend money to skip past this timer repeatedly in the hunt for a specific Pokémon. Affinity Tickets are also only earnable via missions, and can influence the types of Pokémon that are available to recruit, helping to minimise the number of resets needed for a specific creature.
Again, these cannot be purchased with real money.
If you’re someone who plays the mainline Pokémon RPGs, you’re able to bring your Pokémon from those titles over to Pokémon Champions an unlimited number of times, for zero cost. There is no cooldown timer or VP cost associated with bringing your Pokémon over from other titles into this game. Transfers will need to go via Pokémon Home which has a subscription fee attached for larger storage space, but a free Pokémon Home account can hold upto 30 Pokémon at a time for transfer into Champions.
As stated previously, each ranked match in Pokémon Champions brings a player around 300 VP, which can only be earned by playing these ranked matches. Mega Stones cost 2,500 VP, so around 8 matches each to purchase. Held Items other than mega stones can generally be purchased after 2-3 matches, depending on the value of that particular held item. Cosmetics vary wildly in price, but at the top end a new battle theme might cost you 5,000 VP, or around 18 games to unlock. These estimates are likely overestimates, as you’ll often be receiving 1,000 VP at a time for daily and weekly quests, such as getting 3 critical hits in battle, or using 5 moves that are 4X effective. In practice, the grind generally goes faster than the VP per match estimate would suggest, as VP is awarded quite generously for things you’re doing generally already in battle.
In order to demonstrate how effectively this game can be played for free, I started a brand new account the morning of writing this video script, and was able to recreate my current competitive team (which I have reached Master Ball Rank with on my main account) in around 2 hours of play from a fresh account. Granted I knew the team I was aiming to build, and as such could be pretty efficient with my spending, but in around 2 hours I had found all of the Pokémon that I needed, without any transfers from Pokémon Home, and trained them up, giving them their held items and stat spreads.
I did this in part by playing the game’s optional Tutorials, which grant a large amount of one time VP upon completion.
A little additional accessibility info beyond monetisation, based on a few days spent climbing the ranked doubles competitive ladder up to Master Ball tier.
The game does feature a match timer, which will be a barrier for some players with cognitive or motor disabilities. This timer is fairly generous, but is a factor that you’ll need to be aware of.
We talked about this in depth on last week’s episode, but information transparency is much improved in Pokémon Champions compared to past Pokémon games. I particularly appreciate the option to have the remaining turns of field effects such as Trick Room displayed on rotation in the upper left corner of the screen at all times.
While some have complained about this game’s limited pool of Pokémon and Items at launch, I think it’s really good in practice. The number of held items that new players need to consider and remember might be in the metagame is pretty manageable, as is the number of potential threats that they may need to learn and memorise. Knowing for example that Whimsicott is probably a Prankster Tailwind Setter, and that Farigiraf’s Iron Tail will probably shut down priority moves, is much easier to remember with a smaller number of creatures being encountered on a more regular basis. Even with this simplification and the overall lower power ceiling of this format, there is a huge amount of team diversity and playstyle variety at the top end of the competitive ladder, with a rewardingly diverse metagame to explore.
Lastly, there are built in safety nets when climbing the competitive ranked ladder. While match losses can cause your rating to drop, once you reach certain rank tiers you’re safe and won’t fall back down. A player who has reached Ultra Ball Rank 4 for example will never drop back down to Great Ball tier, meaning that if you are struggling to climb the ladder you can afford to lose some matches trying experimental team shakeups, confident in the knowledge that you’re not falling into a rankings hole that you’ll then have to dig yourself out of.
Overall, as someone who came in concerned about the potential for predatory monetisation in Pokémon Champions, I’ve come away pretty happy with the monetisation strategy, at least at launch. There’s obviously room for this to change, it’s possible that a year from now we’ll be juggling multiple real world money currencies to make in game purchases, but I feel pretty confident that isn’t going to happen if their monetisation strategy at launch is any indication.
Pokémon Champions feels pretty healthy at launch. Thankfully, this won’t be a free to start Pokémon game I have to drop less than a week in because it was getting its financial hooks too deep into me.
And that’s great, because I’m at Master Ball rank already, and as soon as Champion Rank is released I want to begin the grind and the climb up to that competitive summit.