[Kurona]

As someone who's been broadly fine with SwSh's decisions so far (my disappointments mostly lie in the game not having quite as much content as it could; whether in regards to dexit or otherwise), this... is something I absolutely hate.

You can say as much as you want about other things that have been done with Pokémon's pricing recently; but that mostly comes from decisions outwith of Pokémon specifically (NSO is hardly GF's policy, nor is the standard switch game price), or subjectivity (you can argue DLC held back content to make you pay more than standard price for it, but you can argue this for any game including some of the best practises of it like Smash and it's ultimately up to the person to decide value).

But this is straight up a hefty price increase for apparently no reason.
Bank costing £5 a year was... a bit frustrating, but mostly acceptable. It was contentious to begin with because the previously free service of Pokémon transfer was free as long as you had the games, but that was its biggest crime; otherwise, £5 a year to cover server costs for a storage service is acceptable and understandable. But now things have been increased to £15 a year, for... no good reason?? They doubled the storage space, but it's not like there's an option to have half the storage space for £8 or something. The extra features are also hardly stressing out the servers; maybe GTS and Wonder Trade but that's being offered for free, so... huh?

Even if some of these features are free, they're also ones that really should have been in the game to begin with or at least added to the game via a later free update. At best making them part of an external free service is just very awkward, clunky and inconvenient and actively discourages me from using it. An IV judge being part of the premium package is, at best, just strange when it's available in SwSh's base game. And then despite the free plan existing, once again; transfer is one of the ones locked behind a paywall. ... oh, and you still need to pay for the outdated Bank service to even be able to transfer, so that's extra awesome.

There's so many decisions here that are bizarre or just straight-up scummy. When you get right down to it; this is asking triple the price for a service that ultimately does not have the value to justify it for any but the most hardcore players and those that just have money to burn, and it especially does not help when there's other costs this generation like NSO.

I was so happy to see the DLC because it actually showed Game Freak moving to a much better, customer friendly model. But, wow, they just saved all their malice for this one.