Pokémon GO's Reward Road Will Cost $500 To Get Everything, Players Estimate

screenrant.com:

recently announced a new program, Rewards Road, to offer special items to players who make in-game transactions this December. Seasonal events like this one are nothing new in , but this is the first time it's instituted Rewards Road. Apparently available now to players in Australia and New Zealand, is expected to roll a similar program out worldwide after this initial testing period — but some players are starting to think it might be more trouble than it's worth.

According to a Reddit post by Cinder_Quill, the Rewards Road program works by giving players points for making qualifying in-game purchases. These points seem to allow them to travel along a tiered rewards system, not unlike a battle pass: the more points you accrue, the better your reward. The only difference is that you don't earn Rewards Road points by actually playing the game — you earn them by spending cold, hard cash.

Some players, like PosterityR, sat down to do the math. In the screenshots above, the maximum tier of Rewards Road requires the player to save up 3,000 points. This particular player heard that an item called an Eggspedition Ticket was one such qualifying purchase, and that each one cost $5 (AUD or USD is unclear) and rewarded 30 points. If all that is true, then a player might have to spend a total of $500 on in the month of December in order to obtain everything in Rewards Road.

Many players balked at the estimated cost of completing the Rewards Road event, with some pointing to a worrying trend of increasing monetization in. Players like theholysun said it best, simply expressing disbelief at the possibility of a player actually spending hundreds of dollars per month on what's ostensibly a free-to-play game.

Others, like vsmack, pointed out that rampant microtransactions could have the opposite of their intended effect, by causing players to actually spend less time and money on. In most cases, even completionists will realize that Rewards Road isn't worth the cost pretty early on,