Pokémon GO Celebration Announced! Thanksgiving Event In Store?

Pokémon GO just announced that they’re thanking the community that has driven the massive success of Pokémon GO with a celebration!

Starting November 23rd and running through November 30th, trainers will earn double XP and stardust for all in-game actions that give those rewards. In the case of XP, that’s most actions you take in the game aside from losing a gym battle and trading Pokémon into Professor Willow. In the case of stardust, that’s catching and hatching Pokémon.

Here’s the announcement from Niantic on Facebook…

SOURCE: Pokémon GO

So what does this mean for trainers? First, you don’t need to use a lucky egg for a week and you’ll still get double XP. But if you want to quadruple your XP, turn on a lucky egg and level up 4 times faster than usual. That’s pretty cool. Also, instead of the normal 100 stardust you get for catching a Pokémon, you’ll get 200. Same goes for keeping a Pokémon in a gym for a day. And egg hatches clearly give the most stardust, so all those will be double as well.

So why am I calling this a “celebration” and not an “event?” Because it really does seem like a way to say thank you to ALL players and celebrate those who are playing it right now. XP and stardust don’t really mean a lot for the casual player, but they mean a lot to trainers who are going out there every day, hatching eggs, spinning Poké Stops, evolving Pokémon and powering them up for gym battles. Those are the people this celebration is targeting. This isn’t an attempt to get more people to play the game, because XP and stardust don’t mean a whole lot to new players.

Said another way, this isn’t a Thanksgiving event. Nowhere in Niantic’s announcement does it say Thanksgiving, and that’s because the vast majority of the world doesn’t celebrate that holiday. On the other hand, Halloween is fairly wide spread so it made sense for them to announce that as their first big event, with the Lapras event being the second. Maybe it’s just me, but whenever Niantic is going to change the way specific Pokémon spawn, that seems like an event.

So, is this a money grab from Niantic? Perhaps. Lucky Egg purchases are bound to go up, but since spawns aren’t increasing, it’ll likely not provide that much of a bump for the bottom line. In fact, it might be put into place to offset the amount of revenue they could lose because people are going to be with family, instead of playing the game.

One last thing to consider is that there could be some surprises for trainers during this time period, given what was found in the datamine of the recent update. Numerous pieces of code referring to Ditto, shiny Pokémon and new Sponsors for Poké Stops were uncovered, so it’s possible that some of those will pop up during this time. Remember that Niantic didn’t announce that Meowth, Cubone, and Marowak would spawn more during the Halloween event, but it became pretty obvious that they were part it too upon launch.

Either way, we’ll see what pops up during that time period, but one thing’s for sure: Wednesday can’t get here soon enough!

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