Pokémon GO has been out for almost a decade at this point. Over those ten years, changes and additions were made each year. 2025 was no different. New events, features, and of course Pokémon were added, alongside changes to pre-existing features and events. Opinions on these formed over the year.
As a player whose played for five years at this point and having reached level 40 in September of this year, I feel that I could throw my hat into the ring and give some of my thoughts on some of these updates.
Arguably, the largest addition this year was the monthly pass. It features 100 rewards for getting points by completing certain tasks, with a catchable legendary Pokémon at rank 100 (even if you did not buy the premium pass). There is a free and paid version of the pass, with the paid pass giving extra rewards. The concept itself is kind of a cliché at this point, but the execution makes it somewhat different from other mobile games. Excluding tasks, you can only earn 250 points per day. These 250 points are earned through catching Pokémon (5 points), hatching eggs (40 points), and winning raids (100 points). If you just did these to progress through the pass, you wouldn’t make it to level 100. That’s where tasks come in. By completing certain tasks, you can earn extra points ranging from 75 to 200 points in increments of 25.
Overall, I think this is a decent addition. It gives free-to-play and less urban players (like me) a way to catch legendaries without having to deal with difficult raid battles that require multiple people to take down.
Another major change was the increase to the max player level. It increased from 50 to 80, and the experience point (XP) requirements were lowered for future levels on October 15 of this
year. Every player’s level was also increased to compensate for the lower XP requirements. This also meant getting the rewards for those levels. This was a good idea on paper, but many players (including myself) did not have the inventory space to store all of the new items. Even the extra bag storage was not enough to have thousands of extra items that overflowed storage.
Finally, there is one issue that has been, and still is, plaguing the game: the lack of ways to get coins. Outside of placing Pokémon in gyms, which yields 50 coins if knocked out the next day (with a daily cap of 50), the only way to consistently earn coins is to buy them. This is a massive issue because coins are used to purchase extra inventory spaces, egg incubators, and much more. An easy fix to this is to double the cap to 100 coins per day. The maximum number of coins a Pokémon can earn can stay the same.
To summarize, 2025 had a lot of new additions to the game. Some of them, like the monthly pass, were decent additions. Others, like the level cap increase, were mishandled. Some problems that existed in the past still exist today and hopefully a solution could be found in the future.
