This morning The Pokemon Company updated the Play Store description for its digital board game Pokémon Duel to notify players that the game's service will end on October 31st, 2019. This may come to a few of you as a surprise, but with so many new mobile-oriented Pokémon games on the horizon, I suppose it's time to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Pokémon Duel originally landed on Android in 2017, and over the last two years, it has amassed over 10 million downloads with a 4.2-star rating. A few Play Store reviews mention a slow turn from fair play to free-to-play greed, so this may have something to do with the service shutdown if fans were getting tired of the title's monetization. I mean it's not like The Pokemon Company would shut down the game if it were still earning tons of cash. Regardless, this is sad news that serves to show how little these companies care about your investment in free-to-play games.

Pokémon Duel game service will be terminated as of 10/31/2019 at 01:59 (UTC).

For details on the end of service, please see the in-game Information.

Thank you for your support. We realize that it's not long until the end of service, but we hope you'll continue to enjoy Pokémon Duel to the very end.

As you can read in the quoted text above, Pokémon Duel will indeed end on October 31st of this year. The Pokemon Company even acknowledges that this news comes as short notice, and yet any sign of remorse is absent from the message. All I can say is that this type of behavior puts the rest of the studio's titles under scrutiny, whether they are available now or coming soon. From now on I'll think twice about spending any money in a The Pokemon Company release, that's for sure.