It’s like a minimum viable product with a vaguely addicting gameplay loop.

You could have just stopped there. Every mass-market mobile game ends up in this trap.

My biggest gripe, although I can understand the reasoning behind it, is that the encounter rates are totally backwards. All the Pokémon, stops and gyms are in cities, and there are scarcely any in the wilderness, skewing the game in favour of those who live in or near cities.

Also, the Pokémon games contain all the elements to make a great ARG MMO. Why reinvent it? They could’ve easily put their paywalls and micro transactions in place while still keeping the traditional Pokémon formula.

It’s not a terrible game, and it obviously has a following and makes money, but it could’ve been so much better. They totally dropped the Pokéball.

I played in 2016 and started playing again in 2023 and I was surprised at how little had changed but its par for the course for the pokemon franchise.

Almost all your other grievances are partly due to how mobile games are monetized and how much of it relies on fear of missing out (applies to regular pokemon events too). Pokemon Go is a constant stream of FOMO to try and get you to spend money when there's barely any payoff. A pokemon you can catch in the wild can already be 87% of the way to a perfect pokemon you spend months (years?) getting stardust, candy and XL candy to max out.

It's very frustrating thinking of how great this game could have been. It was barely a game at release and hardly anything has been added to it. I haven't been following for a few years but I wouldn't be surprised if Niantic removed all pokemon and just added a "give us money for no reason" button.

I hate the dumbed down battling system. Why can't CP be a function of level and stats found in a regular pokemon game instead of one number to rule them all, and have the battles be like the mainline games?

I dunno. I have friends who just seem to enjoy the game without stressing themselves too much...

Pretty much every problem boils down to “but implementing this would’ve made us lose money”

Pokestops could’ve been “typed”. Like “hospital” could’ve been a free heal or have better healing item rates. “Museum” could’ve been the place to get fossil Pokémon, or maybe revive fossils that you find from regular stops. Maybe a grocery store would’ve had better item rates. A school could’ve been a move relearner. Maybe some Pokémon only evolve at church, or at an amusement park. The lures could’ve done something similar, turning normal stops into typed stops

I'm glad they didn't, but they could have definitely done ad deals with some large franchises and small businesses to make their locations have special features.

I’m still playing. It’s fun for a few minutes a day.

I have major issues with this game's battling system. The original game's combat is pretty complex but it is well balanced with 6 different stats, types, abilities, etc. Pokemon go simplifies it into type advantages and a number (CP). CP is more affected by atk than def and hp. This (amongst other things) trivializes def and hp stats.

I was hopeful that they would rework this with pvp but they didn't. Instead they tried to copy the Smogon tiers (the different leagues) but somehow made the original combat which requires a lot of strategy to a dumb tap fast to win combat.

I used to play Pokemon Go a lot till covid and I kept hoping for better updates and new mechanics (I even theorized how they could translate the turn based combat to real time) but it seemwd they didn't want to make it anymore than what it was so I quit.

Yeah, it's sad but not surprising that they ended up being like any other "free" mobile game.

But I always thought that this type of game has a lot of potential, and I'd like to see someone give it a try again, especially if instead of a corporation it was a community project inspired on the fediverse, it would help split costs by having the load be split on many different servers that would cover each a different part of the world, and each region could have its own monsters inspired from the local folklore (this is a feature I really wanted in Pokemon Go, imagine if only Hawaii had the Alola versions of pokemons, and people could trade for them).