Throwaway for obvious reasons, but I've worked for Niantic on Pokemon Go, and this is a rather accurate portrayal of the company's relationship with a large par

Throwaway for obvious reasons, but I've worked for Niantic on Pokemon Go, and this is a rather accurate portrayal of the company's relationship with a large part of the userbase. Pokemon Go is basically a world-scale slot machine, and Niantic's entire business model revolves around preying on users' addictions to steer them into in-game purchases. They are absolutely aware that a huge number of theirs users are addicted to the game, and they employ as many dark patterns as possible to extract every last dollar from these people.