Nianticquietly announced that players of its games will soon see price changes for its in-game currencies forPokemon GO,Ingress, andPikmin Bloom. The announcement was made quietly and could seemingly go unnoticed by potentially affected players until after the changes go into effect.
Niantic made the announcement through its NianitcHelp Support account that certain regions will be seeing price rises. It claims that changes toApple’s App Store price tiersare the cause of the changes after Apple made changes to the developer tier list prices that went into effect in October. Niantic will make similar changes to users on other mobile platforms and keep the price changes in line with iOS users.
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According toNiantic, it’s making blanket changes for any country that uses the Euro as its primary currency. Other countries that will see changes include:
Niantic says the price changes could go into effect as early as October 5.
Niantic making this announcement on its Support twitter page rather than its main account feels like a move to dampen backlash or hide the announcement from its fanbase. As of writing, none of its games' Twitter accounts have said anything about the impending price changes.Niantic has had to deal with waves of backlash and fan revoltfor its decisions in the past and is seemingly trying to soften the wave of angry players for this announcement.
As one fan who made their frustration about the price change known in the NianticSupport replies, Niantic’s net worth is over 9 billion dollars. Not to conflate the company’s valuation to its bank statements, fans once again feel that a massive company that makes millions on billions of dollars a year is passing the global effects of inflation off to its customers when it could take the hit and stand to be a percentage less in the black than in previous years.
Although countries like the United States, Canada, and the UK that host a large percentage of its player base avoid seeing price hikes, countries in the European Union (Germany, France, Portugal, etc) will feel the pinch. Niantic has not said how much the prices will change, so its players may just have to brace themselves for the sudden change and expect the worst. Price hikes have become one of the industry’s bad words for 2022. Sony and Meta have had to increase the prices of the PS5 and the Meta Quest 2 in specific regions, leading Microsoft andNintendo to issue statementsassuring fans that it won’t be doing the same.
