20 Great Video Games That Everybody Turned Against

A decade on from release, Pokémon GO’s augmented reality gaming model still hasn’t really been topped, at least not if we’re counting global coverage and player uptake as worthy metrics. The game has offered gamers and non-gamers alike the opportunity to head out into the wild and snag their favourite Pokémon on their phones using GPS and camera.

GO has given us the chance to catch, train and fight Pokémon in about as close to reality as we’re ever going to get, and for this reason it rapidly shot to the height of popularity. In the years since, however, things haven’t turned out to be as simple as they first seemed – with some pretty unsavoury consequences.

Several factors led to the game’s bad reputation, including the placing of Pokémon and gyms on private property, hazardous areas and even in the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea. But the elements that really got gamers’ gears in a jam are its combination of monetisation and ableism. On the one hand, the monetisation of items encouraged lazy gamers to essentially ignore the fundamentals of the game and just buy their way in; on the other, the monetisation of resources mean that physically disabled players who can’t undertake the kind of demanding exercise necessary to painstakingly build these up, and indeed to level up, are forced to pay through the nose…

Oh, and developers Niantic have only just now removed their PokéStop from Little St James (Epstein Island!).