Obvious straw man. No one is arguing that location based games shouldn't factor in location. The claim was that success in the game shouldn't be dependent on the size of your wallet. You can have location based games that don't require you to travel internationally or even across regions in one's own country, for example.

I've never played Pokemon Go, but I played a lot of the JRPG titles from nearly 30 years ago.

What determines success in Go? Is it battles, or is it literally just collecting Pokemon?

It doesn't really have a fixed objective. It's mostly played for fun.

The idea of Pokemon was started by Satoshi Tajiri who used to like discovering and catching insects and other small creatures locally. From that developed finding Pokemon and having them fight was added to make more of a game out of it. It's now the world's highest grossing media franchise with $88bn revenue according to Wikipedia, way ahead of that Marvel and Harry Potter nonsense. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media...)

It's a bit up to players if they want to casually collect, or fight or compete or whatever. In Pokemon Go at any rate.