At a press conference in Tokyo today, The Pokemon Company has taken to the stage and showed off a range of new games, services and hardware that are coming over the next year or so.
First is Pokemon Home, a new cloud-based service where pretty much every new and big Pokemon game—from Pokemon Go to the upcoming Sword and Shield—will let you store and share your Pokemon across platforms. It’ll also have some social functionality.
Then there’s Pokemon Sleep, a new mobile game from the devs behind Magikarp Jump. It’s out in 2020, and here’s the official description, just so you know this is a real thing and not me making this up:
Soon, Trainers will be able to wake up with Pokémon every morning with Pokémon Sleep, a mobile app from The Pokémon Company. Pokémon Sleep aims to turn sleeping into entertainment by having a player’s time spent sleeping, and the time they wake up, effect the gameplay. While more details about the app’s functionality will be revealed at a later date, it was announced that a new device from Nintendo, Pokémon GO Plus +, will connect to Pokémon Sleep and launch with the app. The device will use an embedded accelerometer to track a user’s time sleeping and send this information to their smartphone via Bluetooth. This new device also has the same functions as the original Pokémon GO Plus, so Trainers can use it with Pokémon GO during the day and with Pokémon Sleep at night. Trainers can look forward to Pokémon Sleep launching for mobile devices in 2020. To celebrate this early look at Pokémon Sleep, Trainers around the world will have the chance to encounter Snorlax that are lying down and deep in sleep in Pokémon GO beginning today.
That new hardware will also be used by Pokemon Go, and is called the Pokemon Go Plus +. It works by setting it on your bed, where it can track your sleep and send the data to your phone, with Niantic and Nintendo working on implementing rest into the game.
Finally, Pokemon Masters is another mobile game featuring a collection of the series’ trainers (and their main Pokemon), with gameplay seeming to be focused on 3v3 battles. It’ll be out later this year.
At a press conference in Tokyo today, The Pokemon Company has taken to the stage and showed off a range of new games, services and hardware that are coming over the next year or so.