Entertainment

'Pokemon Go' Now Lets You Request Your House as a Gym or Pokestop

People who live in rural areas, rejoice! But don't count on Niantic to approve the request.

Getty Images / Drew Angerer

It’s about to become much easier to catch ‘em all.

Pokémon Go will now let users request new PokéStops and gyms near their location. All they have to do is visit the game’s support page, fill out a form, and hope the PokéGods grant the request. (Or at least that someone at Niantic can sift through the influx of messages.)

Technically, this also means that you could request that Pokémon Go turn your home or workplace into a PokéStop or gym — just don’t count on the folks at Niantic giving you that edge over other trainers. Pokémon Go is about the journey, not making your home a destination.

The ability to request new PokéStops and gyms is probably intended to make it easier to play Pokémon Go in rural areas where landmarks aren’t as plentiful as they are in big cities. This makes sense — in the original games, shops and gyms are all found in towns — but also makes the game feel barren to some players.

Introducing more PokéStops and gyms could also reduce the need for tools like Pokemon Go Controller that trick the game into thinking a player is walking around Manhattan when they’re actually just sitting on their couch in one of Nebraska’s more rural areas.

Assuming a decent number of these requests are granted, this simple change will go a long way to making Pokémon Go even better than it already is. Now we just have to hope that Niantic is able to get around to adding some other stuff, like a tutorial or improved battles, to make the game more approachable to newbies.