Pokémon UNITE is choosing absurd gacha systems and increased prices over its players

Pokémon UNITE has reached a new low in the eyes of its community as the game is now prioritizing monetization and its predatory gacha systems over the actual game itself—leading to two countries losing access to the game entirely. 

Just in September, Pokémon UNITE released two major updates that both introduced controversial changes that continue to alienate all but the most dedicated players willing to put up with the game’s ludicrous monetization attempts. Even for a modern free-to-play game that needs to turn a profit to keep the lights on, every single element of UNITE outside of the gameplay itself feels like it lends itself toward making money and not bettering the overall experience. 

Just turning on the game will have you clearing through pages of full-screen advertisements for different ways to spend money and the actual game itself has only leaned further into those tendencies with borderline predatory monetization attempts.

In the big Sept. 5 update for the game that added new events and content, The Pokémon Company also announced that changes are coming to UNITE’s battle pass structure. The battle pass offers players exclusive cosmetics for their character and profile, as well as two Pokémon per season. This past month, the price for the battle pass increased from 490 Aeos Gems to 690 Aeos Gems. 

In terms of raw price increase, this takes the cost of the battle pass from $7.99 to roughly $10 or $11. This wouldn’t be too bad on its own based on the cost of other battle passes in games like Fortnite or VALORANT. But UNITE doesn’t operate on direct purchases for most of its paid content. 

In order to purchase a battle pass prior to this increase, players could simply jump into the game’s shop and grab the conveniently priced $7.99 Aeos Gem bundle, which would allow you to get the battle pass with no problem. Now, there is no 690 Gem bundle, which means you have to spend, at minimum, a $19.99 bundle for 1,220 Gens just to get access to a single battle pass. And now there are multiple paid mini-pass events going on too.

If that was the only area UNITE price gauged its players, it would be a good example of a bad change. However, UNITE and its developers—whether they are directly involved in pricing or not—have been actively over-monetizing the game since it launched. 

The cost for Holowear, UNITE’s name for special skins/cosmetics for the playable Pokémon, stretches from $5 for a basic skin to $40 for one that adds unique effects and animations to the Pokémon while you play. This far outstrips some bundles offered by other games like Fortnite, which tend to charge $20 for skins, accessories, and other goodies. And some of the special effects for moves on UNITE’s skins aren’t even included unless you dive into the next issue…

What happens if you missed a previous battle pass and want to get exclusive cosmetics from it? Well, Unite offers something called “Prize Machine” where you can throw Poké Balls at a selection of previously available items to try and fill up a numbered gauge to get them. Sounds great right?

Unfortunately, any substantial Prize like premium Trainer outfits or Holowear requires upwards of 30 hits on the gauge—and you only get two Poké Balls every 12 hours to use with a maximum, and extremely uncommon, roll of five hits per ball. The prize gauge on each item also resets every 24 hours, so there is no actual way to earn even some of the middling prizes at all. Oh, but don’t worry, you can pay Aeos Gems to reduce the Poké Ball cooldown if you really want something.

By comparison, VALORANT offers players the chance to earn previous battle pass items using Kingdom Credits, which are entirely free and earned by playing the game—no purchase necessary. Even Fortnite recently noted that old battle pass content might be rotated into the shop after a set period of time passes, which would still only require a purchase, not gacha.

There is also the ever-present $9.99 Unite Membership that is constantly pushed despite slowly losing its value—and exclusive content—since it was added to the game. I don’t have time to harp on that, Boost Emblems, or the fact you have to use in-game currency to upgrade key Held Items necessary to use in every battle. 

Instead, let’s focus on playable Pokémon, which all need to have their Unite Licenses unlocked before you can use them consistently in battles. If you want to purchase a Pokémon, the price varies greatly depending on when they were released

Most of the early additions to the game cost 10,000 Aeos Coins or 575 Aeos Gems—with some being even cheaper than that. But once you get into the last two years of releases, the Pokémon start climbing in price to anywhere between 13,000 and 15,000 Coins, while the 575 Gem total remains the same. Or that was true until recently, since newer Pokémon like Miraidon and Ho-Oh set new highs, costing 700 and 840 Gems respectively. Still holding to that case-by-case basis huh?

You do get a handful of Unite Licenses when you first start out, and UNITE isn’t shy about offering trial licenses so you can learn which Pokémon you will want to unlock later—but the cost of these licenses has always been an issue and is only set to get worse as Armarouge cost 790 Gems, the most for a non-Legendary Pokémon yet. 

Players are capped at earning 2,100 Aeos Coins per week through gameplay, and even earning coins through the battle pass or the new weekly login bonus won’t net you enough to get a new Pokémon every week. And that doesn’t include the fact that, once a Pokémon is introduced, they are only purchasable using Gems for the first week before the Coin option is even opened up—even if they are unlockable through an event for free in that same period. 

And now the events are taking a toll on the game in a new way as UNITE is now prioritizing gacha and monetization over the health and availability of the game itself.

On Sept. 27, the official UNITE social channels began posting about a new update dropping for the game that included a brand new kind of Holowear that includes all of the animations mentioned earlier in a single bundle. But instead of putting it up in the shop for what would likely be an obscene price, the developers devised yet another type of gacha mechanic that relies almost entirely on paid Gems and low reward rates. 

The Treasure Chest Challenge has four grades of different chests you can unlock with varying rewards inside. You get random chests for participating in online matches, and each one takes a set amount of time to open depending on the grade, with Grade 4 being the highest at 24 hours and the only way to obtain Elegant Style Sylveon at this time. 

It is only a 10 percent chance to get a Grade 4 chest, and inside that chest it is a 0.02 percent chance to roll the Elegant Style Sylveon Holowear. Multiple users on the UNITE Reddit did the math and noted that it would take years based on the odds to get the Holowear without getting extremely lucky—while the event only lasts 20 days. 

While these stats are community-generated players on social media near-unanimously agree that this event is egregious. Don’t worry though, you can pay Gems to unlock chests faster or even purchase Upgrade Cards in the shop to increase the grade of your chests, which would still run you over $100 to get the Elegant Style Sylveon via event ticket instead of rolling chests exclusively.

To pair with that, a Lucky Ice Pop event is also live that contains Elegant Style cosmetics for your Trainer too, which has its own gacha and Gem requirements.

But why is this any different than the other gacha systems or pricing problems listed earlier? Well, because it looks like this most recent update or the continued implementation and use of these systems has finally caught up with UNITE. 

According to an official post from the UNITE social channels, Aeos Gems and subscriptions will not be purchasable in the Netherlands or Belgium starting on Oct. 31. As if this backhanded offer wasn’t enough, , TPC’s blog post for the announcement also says that the entire game will be ending service in those countries on Nov. 30, 2025.

Announcing that the game is ending service in any capacity while also limiting the options your playebase has to access content in the game is absurd. Without Gems, players in those countries will have to play for weeks or hope for discounts in order to get a single new Pokémon without playing for six weeks—and the battle pass will be completely locked along with nearly every cosmetic.

And, while neither TiMi or TPC have stated the reason for this change, it is likely due to how the Netherlands and Belgium supervise various aspects of gambling across all mediums in those countries.  

Administrations have been cracking down hard on loot boxes and gacha mechanics for years. For the Netherlands and Belgium, this includes requiring heavy restrictions and regulations for any use of in-game currency to earn items impacting gameplay or holding value in secondary markets. 

Most of the specifics regarding these laws apply more to games in the FIFA/EA Sports FC camp for modes like Ultimate Team (this 2022 explainer from GamesIndustry.biz is worth a look to understand this.) That does not stop loot boxes and gacha systems also fall under where different administrations are looking to regulate paid in-game currency and gambling mechanics moving forward.

Video game lawyer Leon Y. Xiao has been very active in documenting how different countries are approaching loot box regulations, such as attempts to ban them outright or the Australian Government moving to implement age restrictions. Along the same lines, California just passed a law that will “compel” digital storefronts to put more disclaimers on purchased games being licensed to customers rather than directly owned by them and additional complaints are currently being raised about “manipulative tactics” around in-game currency in Europe.

This isn’t anything new either, as Pokémon Masters isn’t available in the Netherlands, but also isn’t an all encompassing law since a game like Honkai: Star Rail is still obtainable. 

According to several players in the soon-to-be affected regions, UNITE already omitted the Prize Machine I mentioned earlier from the game in their versions. Additionally, UNITE pro Inder "Inder" Gill noted that both Belgium and the Netherlands were “removed” from the UNITE Championship Series to start 2024, though it is unclear if that was tied to the new announcement.

I have reached out to TiMi Studio/Tencent and The Pokémon Company for comment, with a Tencent representative noting that TPC would need to be the one providing a response as the game’s “global publisher.”

To give you a bit of background, I have over 700 hours in Pokémon UNITE, reached Master Rank for the first four seasons, and am not opposed to spending money to unlock new Pokémon or a battle pass when I do get the itch to jump back in. But these changes have me worried.

Back at my previous job, I endlessly covered Niantic’s baffling community decisions such as the controversial Remote Raid changes and, more recently, the updated Trainer customization that went viral for all the wrong reasons. I didn’t have the chance to do the same for UNITE because the readership wasn’t there, and now I have a sinking feeling that the community for the game is dwindling in certain parts of the world too. 

Pokémon games, specifically the mobile spin-offs that have microtransactions built in have a nasty habit of changing their business models to be more focused on milking the die-hard players who are still spending time with the game right before things start to fall apart. Pokémon Duel added an overpriced subscription system in the final months before it shut down and Pokémon Café Remix did something similar just last year. 

I like playing this game casually with friends, jumping into ranked matches, and even watching competitive events when I get the chance. I think as a MOBA the TiMi team did a great job bringing a variety of Pokémon, their moves, and other elements to life in a fresh way that we haven’t seen before. It adds a new dimension to the franchise and a nice additional pillar to the competitive scene too. 

Unfortunately, deciding to up the battle pass price without significantly adding more content to offset it for players has me thinking that UNITE’s publishers have looked at the data and see that fewer players are buying cosmetics or the UNITE Club membership. So instead of reworking those aspects to be more enticing to the playerbase, they are upping the cost of something that more people purchase every season and adding new, poorly optimized ways to try and get more money out of the playerbase. 

In the words of content cowboy and UNITE commentator Jake "Spragels" Sprague: “I think UNITE doesn’t have a big enough player base, clearly. And now they are trying to get more money out of the customers they currently have.”

Spragels goes on to say that the only reason he thinks UNITE would make a change like this if the game’s “financial picture was positive” is if it is trying to fall in line with the pricing in its Chinese version, which I agree with. But in a games industry where live service titles are a dime a dozen and never guaranteed to succeed, this is a punishment for players who love this game and keep coming back to play. 

That also applies to why the developers aren’t simply omitting the growing number of gacha mechanics—or the game as a whole. It no longer feels like a balancing act, it is about the money.

To the UNITE community, this isn’t a done deal. Just look at what the Apex Legends community did when EA tried to split the battle pass into parts and only allow purchases using in-game premium currency. It was eventually reversed because even with a community and game of that size, EA didn’t want to risk losing a chunk of players and bad press.

Speak with your wallet or make your voice heard on social media and in feedback surveys. You can fight back against this kind of predatory change—and you should. Unfortunately, the continued decay of UNITE doesn’t have me optimistic that anyone with sway for the game is actually going to listen unless something drastic happens.

I want to leave this post off with a comment I saw on one of spragels’ other videos discussing this event. 

Thanks for reading! This article originally started out as a piece discussing the battle pass changes and my overall thoughts on UNITE’s horrific systems, which is still a big focus. However, with the news that another major update is literally killing the game in two regions, I dug a lot deeper (hooray for procrastination on this one I suppose.)

There is currently a petition going around to appeal this decision in Belgium and the Netherlands being shared by players, teams, and even resource hubs like Unite-DB in hopes of making enough noise to, hopefully, get an actual response from The Pokémon Company. I’ve already signed it and urge you to do so as well.

If you want to support my work here, consider subscribing to the blog and following me on other platforms. I will definitely be keeping an eye on this situation if things progress any further.