Pokémon GO is ten years old, and Scopely is still making us playtest it

Ten years is an absolute eternity in the mobile gaming ecosystem. Pokémon GO surviving a full decade to celebrate its 10th anniversary this month is, on paper, a miracle of modern pop culture. But walking through my local park during the massive Pokémon GO Fest 2026: Global event on July 11–12, I was reminded of a frustrating, permanent truth: Scopely—which acquired the game’s development division in 2025 and officially rebranded the team as Scopely Explore earlier this month—builds magnificent sky castles on top of absolute digital quicksand.

The sheer scale of the global celebration was supposed to be a triumph. We got the long-awaited debuts of Mega Mewtwo X and Y, alongside the mythical Zeraora. These are the kinds of heavy-hitting marquee releases that should have felt like a collective coronation for a decade of player dedication. Instead, for vast swaths of the community, the weekend was defined by the spinning wheel of death, lagged-out lobbies, and lost raid passes as the infrastructure buckled.

Once again, the developer’s solution to a broken event is to ask players to schedule even more of their personal lives around the game. The upcoming compensatory global raid event, scheduled for Sunday, July 26, 2026, is a classic band-aid. Yes, we get a nine-hour window to reclaim what we missed, but it highlights an exhausting, repetitive cycle. Why does a multi-billion-dollar enterprise still treat its most loyal fans like unpaid quality assurance testers?

We have tolerated buggy rollouts, server crashes, and broken mechanics since the heady summer of 2016 because the underlying magic of hunting monsters in the real world is simply too good to let go. But there comes a point where "compensation" stops feeling like a generous apology and starts feeling like homework. We shouldn't need a dedicated make-up day to fix a celebration we already paid for with our time and money.

The magic of Pokémon GO is still there—otherwise, we wouldn't still be turning up to local parks in our thousands a decade later. But as we head into the next phase of the game's lifespan, Scopely needs to realise that nostalgia cannot indefinitely patch a broken server. If the next ten years are going to be worth the walk, they need to finally build a game that works the first time around.