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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

> Should the game be inherently fair?

No, but the fairness should be based on skills and engagement, not the size of your wallet.

arguing that "you should be able to get the whole experience regardless of your location" is basically arguing against the entire category of location-based entertainment products. The experience is related to your location. That is literally the product.

Obvious straw man. No one is arguing that location based games shouldn't factor in location. The claim was that success in the game shouldn't be dependent on the size of your wallet. You can have location based games that don't require you to travel internationally or even across regions in one's own country, for example.

I've never played Pokemon Go, but I played a lot of the JRPG titles from nearly 30 years ago.

What determines success in Go? Is it battles, or is it literally just collecting Pokemon?

It doesn't really have a fixed objective. It's mostly played for fun.

The idea of Pokemon was started by Satoshi Tajiri who used to like discovering and catching insects and other small creatures locally. From that developed finding Pokemon and having them fight was added to make more of a game out of it. It's now the world's highest grossing media franchise with $88bn revenue according to Wikipedia, way ahead of that Marvel and Harry Potter nonsense. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media...)

It's a bit up to players if they want to casually collect, or fight or compete or whatever. In Pokemon Go at any rate.

I thought the whole point of geolocation games was that they are traveling games. Games for people who travel a lot. That doesn’t mean you should like them but that IS the mechanic, going around to see places. Wallet use is a part of traveling and that will continue to be true with or without pokemon go.

> I thought the whole point of geolocation games was that they are traveling games. Games for people who travel a lot.

Niantic talk about physical activity and community. Their business model is in app purchases and local advertising. Mechanics encourage controlling local territory.

> skills and engagement

Which, for a lot of cases (not universally, of course), is a function of your wallet's size anyway. Depending on your income and/or net worth, you can afford to spend a lot of your time on those, or not so much.

Why should it be that way?

Because success in life is mostly based on the size of your wallet, and games are supposed to be an escape from life. It sucks when that albatross follows you into your fantasy life.

There are plenty of other games, I don't see why there couldn't be one about traveling in the real world.

Would you frown upon Geocaching as well?

I suppose it is subjective, but it seems to be a pretty much near-universal sentiment among gamers I know that "pay to win" sucks.

A better question is why should it be pay to win?

Pokemon was never like this though. It was always unfair, because you always had to buy two different games (red+blue, gold+silver, etc) to win either of them.

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