We Don't Need To Give Pokémon Champions The Benefit Of The Doubt

The Pokémon Day presentation has come and gone, and I’m pleased to say that some of my fears have subsided, especially now that we know that the next mainline games, Pokémon Wind & Waves, won’t be coming until 2027.

While I’m happy to have more time to tackle my backlog, my worries about Pokémon Champions — that it will be full of microtransactions that exacerbate existing issues in the competitive Pokémon scene — remain. If anything, I’m more sure that will be the case. Not because I’m particularly pessimistic, but because we know how the Pokémon Company has monetized its other mobile games, and it’s reasonable to assume they’ll stay the course.

Pokémon Champions Won’t Say Its Price

Even A Month Out, There’s No Straightforward Pricing Info

Information on what in-game purchases Pokémon Champions will have comes from various sources. No one knows what the prices will look like, but from the Japanese website and other sources, we know that players will only be able to store up to 30 Pokémon in Champions unless they pay for a subscription. That ups the storage to 80, gets players access to some new outfits and battle tracks, allows them to pre-save more teams, and most importantly allows them to get premium rewards from the Battlepass.

The Premium Battlepass rewards are the most immediately concerning, since it seems like they not only allow players to unlock Pokémon, but Mega Stones as well. The good news is the Japanese site does say that “some rewards, such as Mega Stones can be purchased in the shop with VP.”

The bad news is that you have to purchase it with VP.

VP, or Victory Points, are rewards for player performance in Ranked Battles and “other places” to quote the English website. The thing is, you also use Victory Points to recruit Pokémon, train them, or refresh the selection of in-game Pokémon available for you to meet. This means players will have to grind for them a lot to do everything they want to do.

While VP can’t be purchased directly, items such as Training Tickets can be used to bypass the need to spend any. We don’t know if they can be purchased yet.

So, some people might be inclined to think, “well what’s the problem. You can get everything you want as long as you grind out battles, which is what you’re supposed to be doing anyway.”

And frankly, The Pokémon Company doesn’t deserve that benefit of the doubt. We know how they handle monetization in spin-offs and mainline games, these are problems that have existed for years. We might not know what the damage is, but we can be pretty sure there’s going to be damage.

Money Means More Fun

Spending Nets Players A Smoother Experience

If you don’t want to call the competitive Pokémon scene “pay-to-win,” that’s fine, but there’s no doubt that spending money will make your life easier. In both Scarlet & Violet and Legends Z-A, grinding out experience candies and bottle caps is pretty tedious, unless you pay for the DLC, in which case by the end you will be tripping over everything you could possibly need to train up your team.

If you started playing with Scarlet & Violet and want to try using Enamorous on your team, the only place you can get it is by buying Legends Arceus. While strictly speaking, you do not have to have one of the most used Pokémon on your team to succeed competitively, if there was a Poker tournament where entrants had to pay an extra $30 to be able to use Jacks and up, that could hardly be called an even playing field, and that shows up in major tournaments.

According to Pikalytics, the top 10 most used Pokémon in the current competitive format aren’t found in base Scarlet & Violet. You’ll either need to purchase the DLC and Legends Arceus or find someone willing to trade them to you. None of the finalists at the 2025 World Championships in the Masters, Senior, or Junior divisions had a team featuring only Pokémon in the base game of Scarlet & Violet.

So, since paying money means being able to build a better team faster already, it’s safe to assume this will also be true of Champions.

We can also piece together what that looks like. Someone starting fresh with Champions would have to build their team from the ground up using the Pokémon available in-game. If the Pokémon they want isn’t in the roster the game shows them, they can wait 22 hours to see a new line-up, or they can spend VP.

But if they spend VP on that, then they can’t spend it on ensuring their Pokémon have the correct natures and stats. And if they don’t have enough VP for that, they have to go do ranked battles with suboptimal Pokémon, which will mean it’s harder to execute their strategies, which will mean they lose more often, which will mean less VP and so on and so forth.

Compare that to someone who has the Battlepass or has paid for a mainline game with the DLC, where they can just transfer competitively viable Pokémon in and start playing as soon as possible.

Even if you’re not worried about winning, is it fun to have to grind that long to build up your team, or is it more fun to just start battling?

And that’s the best-case scenario, where no held items or Pokémon are actually fully locked behind the Battlepass. Here, it’s just the throughline that paying more money means a smoother experience.

We know from things like Pokémon GO, where you have to pay $10 to get shiny Diancie, or Pokémon Friends, where the mobile version is essentially a mislabeled demo and players have to purchase the in-game DLC to get a full game, that The Pokémon Company and Game Freak are perfectly happy locking content behind a paywall.

There’s really no need to do this thing where you shrug and say, “maybe it won’t be that bad,” because of course it will be. The best possible version of what we have is already making the free experience worse to make the paid version more enticing, because no one would pay for something that wasn’t significantly better.

When Champions was first revealed, many people called it an official version of Pokémon Showdown, the fan site where players can engage in competitive battles. But Showdown was designed to make battling easier and help players get into competitive battling. Champions is designed to make that experience more frustrating, so people pay to make it better.

Maybe that’s the only way this could go down. At the end of the day, The Pokémon Company is a company. Of course, competitive Pokémon is — on some level — a way to sell the mainline games. And this kind of pay discrepancy is inherent in all sports. The kid whose parents can send them to a $1500 soccer camp has an advantage over the kid who’s just playing with friends in the park.

But we should also be clear-eyed about the dynamics at play, especially when it’s something as massive as competitive Pokémon. We shouldn’t ignore that when it comes to monetization, the Pokémon Company will try to drain every cent out of its biggest fans.