Pokémon Champions launch feels more like a customer service than a game

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I am in the UK, where the streaming service HBO Max has only just launched. Great! I finally get to watch The Pitt! Bingeing the first season in one breathless week was riveting. But now we’ve rolled into the weekly release of season two and nobody knows what’s going on. The first episode was released on a Thursday. The second, late on a Friday night. As I write this on a Friday morning, the third episode has just gone up. Confusion reigns. And where are the Hobbit movies I want to watch with the kids? In the UK, HBO Max has one Peter Jackson Tolkien trilogy, but not the other.

It’s mildly annoying. But I expect wobbles like this from a new service launch. They’ll untangle the rights and flesh the archive out over time; they’ll iron out the random scheduling. I’m an early adopter, that’s how it goes. It bugs me, but doesn’t diminish my enjoyment of the movies or shows when I get to them.

When the entertainment is the service, though, things are different. I thought about this during the launch of Pokémon Champions this week.

The Pokémon Company’s new game is maybe the definition of “games as a service.” It’s a pure online battle game, made in the mold of the Pokémon Stadium series, and it’s free to play, with battle passes and stuff. And it is literally a service, because it has been built — perhaps primarily — to serve the Pokémon competitive scene. Champions will replace the latest mainline game in the series in the Pokémon World Championships esports event, and is intended by The Pokémon Company to become the default for competitive video game Pokémon. It’s also able to pull from your Pokémon collections across all games by connecting to the Pokémon Home app, making it a kind of online hub for the whole franchise.

Image: The Pokémon Works/Nintendo, The Pokémon Company via Polygon

Naturally, everybody hates it. It doesn’t have enough Pokémon in it, it doesn’t have the right items, the meta is in disarray. Performance isn’t great, there are bugs, the monetization is weird, it’s grindy. The community is an awkward mix of total novices and hardcore competitive pros.

Not everyone is unhappy; some nerfs and balance changes have gone down well, and some felt that the meta needed a shake-up anyway. But most agree that the game feels unfinished, which is both a fair criticism and stating the obvious. Pokémon Champions will never be finished; it will always be a work in progress. That’s the nature of a live-service game. Maybe it could have used a little more time and more testing before launch, but, to paraphrase the old military saying, no plan survives contact with the playerbase.

I’m sympathetic to frustrated players. When the art and the delivery medium are one and the same, boundaries get blurred uncomfortably; it’s as if I had to watch The Pitt with key characters and storylines missing, only the first take of all Noah Wyle’s line readings, and the color gradation all wrong. But still, we as a community could use a new way to frame the discourse around live-service game launches.

To look at it another way, consider this happy-but-cautionary tale. This week, space exploration game No Man’s Sky added its own version of Pokémon Champions, an arena-battling minigame for alien creatures. Developer Hello Games, led by Sean Murray, has been updating No Man’s Sky with new features for a decade, after players felt its launch state did not deliver on its original sales pitch; as it stands the game now far, far exceeds it. “Sean, we’re okay, you can rest now,” joked one fan. “Sean, we forgive you, it’s time to stop,” said another. And they’re right. But the Pokémon Champions team have only just started.