Pokémon YouTubers say the Shiny hunting experience is dying—they’re right

Pokémon devs have made their games much easier over the years, and as a part of that the shiny hunting experience has been completely changed.

Catching a shiny Pokémon used to be an extremely strenuous endeavor that would take hours, days, or sometimes even months to complete. Those times are far in the rearview mirror, and as some PokéTubers have pointed out, Pokémon Go and the addition of other in-game tools have played a major part.

The discussion around the value of Shiny Pokémon recently kicked off after a post on social media by creator HoodlumCallum. In a thread, they explained that the influx of shiny Pokémon available in Go has “devalued shiny hunting in the main games,” and there’s no real argument against this to be made.

Why would anybody spend hours combing any of the base games to find a shiny when they can catch dozens during a Pokémon Go spotlight hour? Thanks to Pokémon Home, it’s as easy as connecting to the app, and within minutes you can have all of these shinies in your Pokémon Scarlet and Violet saves.

It has become simply too easy to get Shiny Pokémon in the series. Fellow creator Aero also brings up a good point in that the Shiny Charm and similar items have decreased the value of shinies in the mainline games. While not as excessive as Pokémon Go, using the charm speeds things up for players drastically. Fortunately, you can choose to not use these if you want to keep things close to as difficult as they were originally.

Just looking at the numbers from each generation paints the picture perfectly and shows the big Pokémon Go problem. Back in Generation II, the odds of finding a shiny Pokémon in the wild were 1/8192. This has increased substantially with each generation, however, it isn’t until you look at Pokémon Go that things get out of hand.

The base rate in Pokémon Go is around 0.2 percent, but it can go as high as 10 percent during events. That is a staggering change from the mainline games, making it the obvious place to farm for shinies if that’s your only goal.

Whether or not you believe that making Shiny Pokémon more accessible is a good thing, there’s really no argument to say it hasn’t gotten easier, and with Pokémon Go still in the mix, it’s not going to return to how it was anytime soon. Fortunately, longtime Pokémon players will still have the memories of grinding for that shiny Charmander the old-fashioned way.