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Imagine making friends around the world through Pokémon GO—then learning that raiding with them will cost more, and you can only do it five times a day. That was the change announced in 2023. And for some players, it felt like the game was putting a limit on the community they’d built.
Here’s the setup. Pokémon GO is the phone game that gets you outside to find and battle Pokémon. A raid is a group battle against a powerful one. Remote Raid Passes, introduced in 2020, let you join without being at the battle’s location. On one side of this dispute: the game’s team at Niantic, which wanted to bring more play back outdoors. On the other: players and Pokémon creators who said remote raids had become an important way to play together.
On March 30, 2023, the Pokémon GO team announced changes taking effect April 6. A single Remote Raid Pass would rise to 195 PokéCoins; a three-pack, to 525. Players would also be capped at five remote raids per day, except when the limit was raised for special events. The team offered a possible way to earn passes through Research Breakthrough rewards, and more Candy XL for attending certain raids in person. But those additions did not answer the central objection. By April 4, creators were sharing an open letter under the hashtag Hear Us Niantic.
The letter’s point was bigger than the price. Its signers argued that the five-raid limit would hurt rural players without a nearby group, disabled players unable to get outside, night-shift workers and busy parents. They also described friendships formed across borders during years of remote play. In other words, when the game said, ‘Get together,’ some players answered: ‘We already did. It just happened online.’ Those are the letter’s concerns, not proof that every player experienced the changes in the same way.
Niantic’s case was about the kind of game it wanted Pokémon GO to be. Its announcement said remote raids had come to dominate play in a way the team never intended. It argued that rebalancing toward in-person raids mattered for the game’s long-term health—and said remote passes were staying. The protesters offered a different solution: make meeting up more rewarding, they said, rather than restricting the way distant friends play.
The story did not end with the 2023 cap. In May 2025, the Pokémon GO team raised the normal remote-raid limit from five to ten. It also opened Shadow Raids and Max Battles to remote participation. An announcement for an October 2026 event still described ten as the usual daily limit, temporarily raised to twenty for that event. So the five-raid ceiling was eased. But an August 2026 TechRadar interview described the remote-raid price-hike dispute as unresolved. This was a partial change, not a clean return to the old arrangement.
That is what makes this more than a quarrel over a game item: both sides say community matters, but they mean different ways of reaching it. Can Pokémon GO encourage people to meet outdoors without making its distant players feel like a lesser part of that community?