Pokémon TCG Pocket’s Abysmal Trading Is Going To Be Addressed

Last week, some three months after launch, Pokémon TCG Pocket finally adding the ‘T’ from the game’s title, the trading. And it’s hard to imagine how it could have been worse. Almost impossibly “expensive” to use, what were presumably measures to prevent real-money markets and scalpers have led to a system that is so punitive to players as to be useless. Thankfully, developers Creatures, Inc. and DeNA have since released a statement saying they recognize all is not OK.

Pocket’s trading is a ghastly mess. If you want to trade, say, a single one-star rarity card (typically a non-ex full-art card), you’ll require 400 trade tokens, which presently can only be gained by destroying four other one-star cards. Then, to trade for a card you actually want, you need to be in direct communication with the other person outside of the application, as there’s no way to communicate such information within. It’s very poor, and thank goodness, the negative reaction appears to have been heard.

“Since releasing the first iteration of the trading feature a few days ago,” says a statement from the developers via X, “we have received a large number of comments. Thank you all for sharing your feedback.”

The statement goes on to explain that the “requirements and restrictions” are there to prevent bots and malfeasance, and all this was done out of a desire to “maintain a fair environment for all players.” But, they go on, “we understand that some of the restrictions put in place are preventing players from being able to casually enjoy the feature as intended.” The developers are now investigating ways to improve things, as well as promising more ways to accrue trade tokens, “including through event distributions.”

What’s so interesting here is how this obnoxiously terrible feature was so obviously flawed. People didn’t discover the design’s issues through extensive experimentation, nor did they only show up once a large audience was participating. Instead it was, at a glance, blatantly horrible. You needed to destroy swathes of your most precious cards (and if sacrificial, inherently the very cards you would have wanted to trade away) to be able to get a single new one, and you couldn’t just click a button to say which card you wanted in return! The developers had to know it was awful—it’s inconceivable that they could not.

Yet, trading is extremely tricky ground for Pokémon. With the real-life versions of the cards, as we’ve been reporting for a while, prices for the rarest new cards are hitting all-time highs—we’re talking $1,500 for a single card from the most recent set. Being physical objects, The Pokémon Company International (TPCi) and Creatures aren’t able to impinge on such resale markets, and can only exercise any level of control by producing more product for people to buy. But here, in this digital-only realm, there was a presumed ability to prevent such a second-hand market growing out of control.

The problem is, there isn’t an elegant or reasonable way to allow a pleasant in-game trading mechanic that cannot be exploited by third-party marketplaces. If it exists in any practical way, it will immediately be exploited by those wishing to more easily secure the specific cards they want, and those wishing to take people’s money to allow them to do so. The only solution is to create an in-app version of the feature that’s as good as anything anyone’s offering externally, rather than making the act of trading so actively unpleasant and punishing that no one would ever want to pay to do it.

Oddly enough, TPCi has done this successfully before! The original digital version of the Pokémon trading card game, PTCG Online, had a fantastic in-app trading function. You publicly listed the card you were offering and the card you wanted in exchange, and then anyone else could search for the card they want, and see if they had the requested trade. Click, boom, done. For reasons TPCi has chosen never to divulge, the trading feature was removed entirely when the forced switch to the poorer replacement app, PTCG Live, was implemented.

So it’s good news that feedback has been heard, but it remains very unlikely that trading will ever become the feature people have hoped for in Pocket, given the seeming reluctance to allow any sort of third-party marketplace. Let’s hope it at least makes a significant improvement. In the meantime, it seems, the app will find new ways to hand out piles of trading tokens.

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