I’m Ben, and I spend money on live-service video games that may shutter their virtual doors at any point. I make a point of not counting how much I spend, but it’s not a lot. I bought one Collection Event in Apex Legends for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Fuse’s heirloom – which I don’t regret – buy a few coins during big 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokemon Go events – which I don’t regret either – and over a decade ago spent three figures on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links’ gacha systems to build a deck that was outclassed with the next relea🙈se. Yeah, I regret 🍒that one.
I try my best to avoid buying into predatory microtransactions and thus telling corporate executives that it’s okay to continue pushing them, but I like supporting the games I play a lot. I’m not going to boil games down to a reductive cost per hour metric, but I have thousands of hours in Apex and, as of last year, precisely 2,110 hours in Pokemon Go. Yes, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:I worked it out. Iღ’m happy to send the developers some cash in return for my continued enjoymen🍒t.
Again, Duel Links is the black sheep.
Enough justifying my personal expenditure. Let’s take a look at what I bought for Pokemon Go Fes🤡t and whether it was worth it🦋.
The Lead-Up To Pokemon Go Fest 2025
First, I bought the event ticket itself. That’s £14.99, so $21. Yep, it costs more for us over here. After that, I bought the bundle of 2,500 PokeCoins for £19.99, a little ove♛r $27. I a꧋lso caved in and paid for the Timed Research that rewarded a Galarian bird encounter, because I’ve still not caught my beloved Zapdos despite daily route grinding. £7.99 is roughly $11.
I planned to spend those precious PokeCoins on Zacian raids on the Sunday of Go Fest, when I wouldn’t be playing as much. I could use the plethora of free, in-person raid passes to get my hands on a good Zamazenta on Saturday, and then get a good 15 remote Zacian raids o🔯n Sunday. At least, that was the plan.
Then Pokemon Go released the Regi Timed Research. For every raid you completed in the run-up to Go Fest, you were rewarded with a bonus encounter with a Regi. It’s two for the price of one. Add on the f😼act that I didn’t have a Regieleki or Regidrago yet, and it was a no-brainer. All my coins were spent by Friday, with Go Fest due to start the very next day – and already more than $50 spent before the event had even started.
Pokemon Go Fest 2025: Success Or Failure?
Having assessed my spending ahead of Go Fest, I went big with my next purchase. Bigger than I usually go. 5,200 PokeCoins cost £39.99 ($55), and present🐻ed a saving over buying in smaller increments. Judging by how hard I’d gone in the run-up to Go Fest, I figured it was a worthwhile investment. Let’s see how that one works out, Ben.
Go Fest on Saturday was great, if a little too hot. I played pretty hard for five hours, pushing a pram around a local park and joining plenty of in-person raids. My brother even made the trip over, so it was great to hang out like the old days. I on𒉰ly caught eight shinies in the day, which felt a little on the low side considering I had a ticket that supposedly promised a higher likelihood of enc♋ountering a shiny. However, one of them was a Zamazenta, and with the supposed shiny rates I’ve seen on social media, I’ll take that – especially as it has 15/13/15 IVs.
On Sunday I played a little, picked up a shiny Dedenne, and joined a bunch of remote Zacian raids. I found one good e🌠nough to deserve the form change, buꦫt no shiny. Honestly, it’s about what I expected from the event. And I was left with around 3,000 coins, having overestimated the number of remote raids I’d take part in over the weekend.
Was It Worth It?
I had great fun at Pokemon Go Fest 2025. Did my spending add to that fun? A little. I definitely overestimated how many remote raid passes I needed to buy, but raiding the Regis midweek was fun, so I don’t regret double dipping. Playing Go Fest with friends and family was good too, but the coins didn’t help much. Truth be told, neither did the ticket itself. It granted me access to Volcanion Special Research – I don’t care about Volcanion – and the event spawns, but I didn’t really care for any of them. Truth b♏e told, I treated this as a raid event, which ওyou didn’t need any ticket for.
My money spent on remote raid passes was well invested. I got a shiny Registeel and shiny Zamazenta from remote raids, and also grabbed my fi♋rst two Gigantamax monsters, Rillaboom and Inteleon, thanks to the big groups of players playing the game this weekend. That said, I probably didn’t need to shell out $75 on passes.
After Go Fest, I also bought the paid track of the June battle pass in order to get a Lucky Trinket, which brought my total expenditure to pretty much bang on $125. As a reminder, I still have around $40 of value of coins in my account, but I feel like I could have spent less, and better. I deliberatel🏅y avoided buying the battle pass with the Gold Bottle Cap because I don’t really care that much about IVs and the rest of the rewards were rubbish. But it would have made more sense to invest in that rather than the event ticket itself, truth be told. I reached level 244 over the weekend, so would have received hatfuls of stardust and experience on top of the coveted Bottle Cap had I shelled out the £20 ($27).
I had a great weekend, and my coin balance is pretty well set for the next major event (provided I don’t fritter it away before then), but if you’d told me beforehand that it would cost me $125, I wouldn’t have played at all. In fact, writing this article has given me a certain sense of clarity about ꦗit all. The money I spent on the game did not add to my enjoyment at all. I loved spending time with friends, catching up with family, and feeling like part of something bigger. But I could have done that for nothing. Sure, I would have had a severe sense of FOMO, but feeling left out is better than being $100 in the hole.
My lesson from Go Fest this weekend is that this game isn’t about the money𝓡 you spend, or even the shinies you catch. It’s about the people you’re with, the conversations you have, and the stories you tell afterwards. Today, mine is a sad tale, but it could have been worse. I could have spent the weekend all alone, burning the same amount of cash on Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links.
This Japanese Shrine Has Become An♔ Unl🧜ikely Pokemon Go Pilgrimage
Pokemon Go is still massively popular i♚n Japan, but one shrine in particular ⛎has become a gamer tourist hotspot.
