The Pokémon Company held its 2019 Press Conference tonight, and it was surprisingly filled with plenty of mobile news for Pokémon fans. Let’s take a look at what you can expect out of the company during the next year.
Pokémon Home
First up is Pokémon Home, a new cloud service that’s lets you store and share Pokémon across platforms. The service is compatible with Pokémon Bank on the 3DS, Pokémon Go on Android and iOS, and Pokémon Let’s Go, Sword, and Shield on the Nintendo Switch.
Finally, Pokémon Home also lets you trade Pokémon with players around the world, friends, and nearby users. The service will debut in early 2020.
Pokémon Sleep and Pokémon Go Plus Plus
Next up is Pokémon Sleep, an app that game-ifies sleeping. The app keeps track of how much time you spend sleeping and when you wake up, both of which “affect gameplay.”
That said, we also learned that Pokémon Sleep will use a new device called the Pokémon Go Plus Plus (yes, that’s the actual name). The device is similar to the existing Pokémon Go Plus in that they both let you connect to Pokémon Go, store a Pokémon inside, earn candy as you walk, and alert you to nearby Pokéstops and Pokémon.
However, the Pokémon Go Plus Plus also doubles as a sleep monitoring device. It features an accelerometer and transfers sleep information to your smartphone over Bluetooth.
The Pokémon Company plans to reveal more details “at a later date.” The app launches sometime in 2020.
Pokémon Masters
Last up is Pokémon Masters, which is the closest thing to a “traditional” Pokémon game that we’ve seen on mobile. Pokémon Masters brings together a collection of trainers and their main Pokémon from the long-running series. Gameplay seems to focus on 3v3 battles, though details remain extremely slim at the time of this writing.
The idea came from Game Freak’s Ken Sugimori, who wanted to create a game that includes all past and present Pokémon trainers from the series.
Gameplay seems to focus on 3v3 battles, though details remain slim at the time of this writing. That said, The Pokémon Company will talk more about Pokémon Masters sometime in June.