For this critical play, I analyzed the game Pokemon Sleep, Pokemon’s take on a sleep-tracking video game for mobile devices, developed by the Japanese studio Select Button and The Pokemon Company. Though the app store lists the game for ages 4+, the health utility and well-being elements of the game seem to indicate that the game is more targeted towards young to middle-aged adults.
The core gameplay loop revolves around your Snorlax and maximizing its “strength.” Your recruited Pokemon collect berries and cooking ingredients that rack up your Snorlax’s strength throughout the week. Depending on your Snorlax’s strength, increasingly numerous, rare, and powerful Pokemon will appear when you wake up each morning, which you can then recruit with items called “Poke Biscuits.”
Poke Biscuits are by far the most crucial resource in Pokemon Sleep, and the design of the game and its microtransaction ecosystem revolves around how biscuits are used to recruit Pokemon. While I found the game does nudge the player towards its Poke Biscuit microtransactions by surfacing them at the highest-intent moments and creating FOMO through the highly RNG-influenced Pokemon subskill system, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the game actively refrains from punishing the player for patience, reducing the temptation of impulsive purchases.
Each Pokemon you encounter needs to hit a certain number of friendship points to be recruited, indicated by the bars above their heads. Each type of biscuit provides a certain number of friendship points, ranging from 1 for Poke Biscuits to 5 for Ultra Biscuits. Poke Biscuits are the only ones you can acquire with “Sleep Points,” the easily accessible points you get simply for playing the game. The stronger Great and Ultra Biscuits both require Diamonds – the rarer, usually paid currency – and can only be purchased a few times a month.
Generally, the player is always incentivized to use stronger biscuits. Rarer and stronger Pokemon require more friendship points to recruit. There also exists a Fullness mechanic, where after 2 biscuits of any type are fed, the Pokemon has a random chance to become “full,” preventing you from gaining any more friendship points. This means your chances of recruiting the Pokemon are best when you use a few powerful (and expensive) biscuits, rather than numerous weaker ones.
Pokemon that you don’t recruit in that day’s feeding session are gone until you encounter them by chance on another day, which creates urgency and FOMO to max out their friendship points when you encounter them. This urgency is directly capitalized upon with the design of the Biscuit menu. The shop can be easily accessed when you open your biscuit inventory, and this version of the shop is actually a condensed version that only has Poke Biscuits, reducing decision paralysis and making it as frictionless as possible to act on your impulses.
Comparison of streamlined Pokemon recruiting optimized store vs. general store
However, no Pokemon are limited-time only. Though some might be rare, you are sure to run into a Pokemon again eventually if you do not recruit it immediately. There is no sunk cost either, as friendship points carry on from encounter to encounter.
Thus, the randomness you are reducing by buying biscuits for a quicker recruitment is not the chance of getting the Pokemon, but the time it takes to acquire it. There’s no downside to waiting, so unless you’re extremely passionate about getting this particular Pokemon, there’s not much incentive to spend money to get it quicker. Players are even given a 3-point Bonus Biscuit each day, so even if it’s slow, they are guaranteed to be making some progress towards recruitment each day. The game certainly doesn’t shy away from nudging you towards purchases, but also doesn’t let microtransactions destroy the experience for more casual or patient players.
The other half of the Pokemon recruiting ecosystem is the subskills system. Every Pokemon has 5 subskills randomly chosen from 22, varying in usefulness. A Pokemon’s effectiveness depends far more on its subskills than its species, with better subskills having a lower chance of appearing. This means that you will likely need to recruit many, many versions of a Pokemon to get one with optimal skills, giving Biscuits additional weight that reduces a lot of the FOMO-reducing design discussed earlier.
However, the subskills system has pros that still keep the overall ecosystem balanced. For instance, fully-evolved Pokemon require a lot more biscuits than their pre-evolved forms, but they do not have higher odds for better subskills. This means you are almost ALWAYS incentivized to spend your biscuits on unevolved Pokemon rather than dumping expensive biscuits on evolved Pokemon since you can effectively get more “rolls” for good skills.
Since you can only recruit Pokemon once per day, the addictive potential of this game is quite low. However, every Pokemon you recruit has so many points of randomness that it’s almost impossible to get a perfect one. But the possibility of a perfect version of a Pokemon is something that the player always knows is possible, meaning the player always has some drive to continue recruiting a species of Pokemon, even if they already have a perfectly usable one. Giving each Pokemon so much variation is a form of manufactured discontent that makes a player perpetually dissatisfied with their current state, knowing that a better outcome is possible, no matter how improbable it may be.
