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It is no secret that Pokemon Unite does not see the same love and attention it initially did when it first came out. While a drastic change in genre is not going to draw every Pokemon fan in, even the ones who claimed to once love the game have slowly backed away from the title, as seen in its dwindling player numbers. This can be traced to a lot of different factors that the developers and The Pokemon Company are responsible for.
In fact, many players believe that every aspect of the title has had some glaring flaw. So which of these is the biggest issue, and which has the potential to kill the game if it's not changed?
5 reasons why Pokemon Unite is dying
1) Poor monetization
Ever since the very beginning of the game, Pokemon Unite has struggled to find a balance between monetization and gameplay. While this eventually got better, with item upgrades being much easier to come by, the issue has spread to different aspects of the game, the biggest offender of which is the recent wave of new characters to come to the game.
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This will be touched on heavily later, but some of the latest characters, like both Mewtwos, Mew, and Zacian, have all been targets of controversy. This is due to the developers making these new characters completely gamebreakingly powerful, requiring those who want to use them to pay up before they get nerfed and re-released for a cheaper price.
2) Dumbed-down gameplay
Just from looking at the game, it is clear that Unite is meant to be a good entry point for new players looking to get into the MOBA genre. While the game does a good job of teaching players the basics and what to expect, it offers very little for those who wish to up the ante and take their skills to the next level.
Other MOBAs like League of Legends and DOTA 2 offer items that players can purchase within a match to boost their character's stats. These items can be bought by any character and work great for mixing things up in terms of the builds you can use. This is not present in Pokemon Unite, which instead opts for the pay-to-win upgradable held items feature, scrapping intuition in exchange for more money.
3) Busted new characters
Mythical and Legendary Pokemon in the game's roster have been problematic ever since the game's release. The developers have been building these creatures with similar stat spreads to the ones they have in the main series, which is why they are always much more powerful than others like Charizard and Pikachu.
Zacian and Mewtwo are the two most problematic characters in the game right now, and the developers are still unsure as to how they can fix them. This leaves players with two options: either they buy these broken characters and use them in their games, or they avoid buying these characters, get steamrolled in every match, and eventually uninstall the game.
4) Released for the wrong platform
MOBAs are games that are very hard to translate over to consoles. Smite manages to do this relatively decently, thanks to its third-person perspective, but top-down MOBAs like Unite are bad choices for controllers. Another factor contributing to the game's dumbed-down mechanics is a controller's lack of buttons, which leaves the game feeling incredibly clunky on the Nintendo Switch.
While the mobile community does not experience this issue as severely, having an interface crammed with tappable icons, joysticks, and the player's fingers can be grating on the eyes during prolonged play. If Pokemon Unite came to PC, where MOBAs are much more accepted, the game would have carved out a more dedicated playerbase in its early months.
5) Poor performance and UI
Pokemon Unite is simply not a very appealing game to look at. Although it seems silly to expect a Pokemon game to be up to modern standards in this department, the poor and sometimes laggy graphics can really take players out of the game. Despite it being present on home consoles, the game was definitely designed to primarily be a mobile game, and this shows in the poor graphics on consoles.
The user interface for managing menus and selecting characters in lobbies could also use some serious work. Many were quick to write this off when the game first came out, hoping it would be fixed later on, but these issues are still present in the game almost three years later. This leaves many to write Pokemon Unite off as another one of The Pokemon Company's low-effort cash grabs.
