"[Discussion] Niantic bursts the Pokemon bubble"

#PokemonGO: This morning, for the third week running, social media feeds are abuzz with Pokemon Go trainers sharing screen shots of their freshly delivered EX Raid passes. Unfortunately, like the vast majority who play the game across the globe, I opened the app to discover my cupboard is again bare. My two sons feel similarly robbed of a shot at Mewtwo.To put it in context, Niantic announced Mewtwo’s imminent arrival on August 14th. In a typically ambiguous news release, trainers were told that qualification for an invitation to an EX Raid depended on successfully defeating a raid boss, doing it ‘recently’, and hoping that the gym you raided is selected for an EX Raid.Given that we’d already completed upwards of 100 raids on the legendary birds, we felt we were in with a good chance. But that ill-defined word ‘recently’ began to bug us. What if ‘recently’ only equated to 1 week? That’s two weeks of hard won bird raids discounted. What if ‘recently’ it only means 5 days? Or 48 hours? We began to sweat.Rightly or wrongly, Niantic’s announcement encouraged us to spend quite a few dollars and continue to raid as many different gyms as we could. The legendary birds got extended for three weeks and we kept raiding. The legendary beasts were rolled out and we raided like there was no tomorrow. What was fun, became a slog. Raids got dull. A pedestrian procession of tapping, trapping and transferring. We consoled ourselves that our chances of an EX Raid invitation were sky high.But still no Mewtwo.And when Mewtwo did show up, it was in a handful of test raids. Fine, we thought. Iron out the glitches and kinks. Another week of raiding passed. And then Mewtwo (in association with Sprint) got rolled out. And that’s when things turned really sour.The beauty of augmented reality is that it creates a world that is geographically familiar, and populates it with the fantastic. It’s a unique form of escapism that let’s us tune out of our mundane surroundings and embrace something more remarkable. By taking the AR world’s most sought after monster (Mewtwo) and hatching it only in the stores of real world corporate sponsors, Niantic has inexplicably burst its beautiful bubble. It has happened again this morning. This time it’s Starbucks. And, like their coffee, it leaves a foul taste in the mouth.Of course, we are told they are still ‘testing’. Nonsense. I have worked in the frontline of marketing for over 20 years. This is a money grab, plain and simple. A murky, mucky piece of corporate badging that has stained the rare world Niantic had created. So much so that cynical – or smart – spoofers have been targeting sponsored gyms all over the world and showing off their second and third EX Raid invitations.The EX Raids ‘invitation’ system is fundamentally flawed and it will kill the game. It is good for short term profitability but bad for customer loyalty. In a game predicated on ‘gotta catch them all’, the invitational system is not ‘exclusive’ … it simply excludes.My sons and I have conquered over 300 raids and spent foolish money as self-confessed ‘completists’. The reality is that we may never ‘catch them all’. It’s entirely dependent on luck and corporate intrusion. If or when we do get a shot at Mewtwo, and should we catch it, my reaction will be one of begrudging relief and not happiness. The magic is gone. via /r/pokemongo http://ift.tt/2wxFvE9