Let’s Not Pretend: Pokémon TCG Pocket Is Promoting Gambling To Children

There is a way to play the Pokémon TCG on your phone or tablet that is entirely free. Not “free-to-play,” but “free to leave it with your kid and not ever worry.” While it’s not the world’s best piece of software, Pokémon TCG Live is an application that lets you play the full-size, 60-card deck version of the trading card game for an unlimited amount of time and doesn’t feature a single way to pay money. Cards are added to the game using the code cards that come as an extra in physical Pokémon card packs, but they can also be bought in their hundreds for cents from various websites and stores (I throw them in the recycling in stacks), but that’s the end of any expenses. Even if you wanted to, there’s no way to add your bank card to purchase even the silliest of cosmetics. And when it comes to Pokémon, that feels right.

Pokémon TCG Pocket contains, at my last count, twelve different in-game currencies. This stripped-down, 20-card deck version of the game is a masterclass in gacha (gambling) game design, feeding you handfuls of each currency when you first begin playing, teaching you all the gameplay loops they allow, and then—right when it’s all becoming natural—cuts you off, hard. Here, the only way to add new cards to your deck is to engage with systems that endlessly encourage you to spend real-world money within the app, on top of an array of other systems that peter out just before you’re done, unless you fork out. And when it comes to Pokémon, that feels wrong.

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