the battle pass not even being an advantage is such an odd choice for a f2p game. odd choice in a good way but like how they are even making money lol
Very likely the main money income should be from the premium one.
Even with just the beginner pass, you're kinda stuck with 100 box slots. Do note that as far as I know, you can *only* transfer 30 pokemon from Home at any given time and there isn't a way to increase this.
Currently this isn't much of a big deal, but once the pokedex expands, well suddently you start actually needing way more than 100 boxes unless you want to constantly swap between Home and the games. This game has 1000 pokemon, and sure they're not all competitively viable, but you do need options and for some pokemon you actually want multiple of, unless you plan to constantly be spending VP to change your mons stats.
And this is even assuming the player owns the actual games and has access to a wide setup of Pokemon in Home to begin with! As if you don't, you're pretty much stuck having to deal with the gacha-ish system to acquire your roster, which requires having enough skip tickets (which again, the battle passes help with).
Realistically speaking, I can see that longterm the people who actually play a lot of VGC (not just the actual "pros", but even the higher echelons of the amateur ones who just like to grind to Champions tier every season) will want to be paying the premium pass.
(Plus, I wouldn't be surprised if later down the line they have paid only skins or cosmetics like changing pokemon pokeballs or stuff like that)
Note, I am not against this system. The game has to make money somehow, and it needs to be "just inconvenient enough" that VGC players still are likely to buy the games that come out as it's a faster way to obtain the pokemon for their roster, and this is a somewhat harmless system that does not punish pure F2P players, just slows their progression a bit.
I've definitely seen much more predatory systems, even from Nintendo themselves.
At least currently, the only "P2W" element of this game are AZ's Floette, Greninjite, Delphoxite and Chesnaughite, which I hope are just "temporary exclusives" kinda like they are in ZA itself and will be released to everyone in the following seasons.