Fans Think Latest Pokémon Go Artwork Was Made With AI::Pokémon Go publisher Niantic has aroused fans’ suspicions after a promotional image showed some telltale signs of potentially being AI artwork, rather than something made by an actual human artist. The image in question appears in promotional material for Adventures Abound, the next season of the mobile collectathon game, set to run from September 1 […]
So, this is the direction we’re headed. Why is it news when a company does it?
I personally care because it means destroying the livelihoods of artists in exchange for shitty nonsensical bootlegs of art. Making it bad press is really the only recourse we have against this.
It’s because Niantic have actively made the game far worse in the past year, after a few quite decent years through the pandemic. Them using ai to generate the latest artwork just epitomises how ridiculously lazy they’ve gotten. The artwork on the loading screens was one of the few examples of legitimately good work they ever produce, so now they don’t even have that.
I don’t think anyone actually cares that it’s ai, but it is classic Niantic to just slap together ai artwork and make no attempt to hide it.
Year? I quit playing well over a year ago because of Niantic’s enshittification policies.
Well yeah it’s been shit for a while now, it was in a terrible state before the pandemic but it was at least somewhat enjoyable to load up every so often. This past year it’s become basically unplayable, even the addicted whales have been dropping it in droves.
I’ve been boycotting the game since the remote raid price increases but caved for a few hours during Go Fest (without the ticket) I couldn’t believe how bad it’s actually gotten.
I live in a city and the spawn rate even during Go Fest is now attroucious, a handful of Pokémon every half a mile, it used to have 100s of spawns. The city centre now is almost as bad as the little remote village I lived in when the game first came out.
No one was raiding locally either, there was never a raid scene here but you could atleast do some during Go Fest in previous years.
The Gyms were full of people who’d been in them for well over two weeks at zero health, right in the centre of the city, last year they changed hands really regularly, even though our scene was relatively small. The two gyms at the top of the road where I live had people in them for over a month, all low level players when it used to be a us long term players who’d take them from each other. They used to change hands multiple times a day as there on a busy high street, so I could always get my coin’s, now I couldn’t even farm for the ridiculously priced remotes even if I wanted to.
It’s way worse than it was even a year ago.
I went cold turkey: deleted the app, stopped following r/pokemongo and so on, deleted my bookmarks, and I don’t miss it at all. We went on a short vacation a few months later and about 3 days in I realized how much I was enjoying myself because I didn’t feel an obligation to find every gym/waypoint just to spin them.
I can definitely relate to that! I used to try and find something special as a keep sake in the game to remember my trips abroad, so I’d waste quite a bit of the holiday trying to find something.
The only thing I will say the game does well and I do miss about it is that it’s a great game to play as a couple. Me andy husband had quite a few dates that we probably wouldn’t have bothered to do if it wasn’t for events in the game. We’ve tried replacements like Orna but they just don’t really hit the same spot.
When a company does something controversial, it becomes news.