Pokémon saw some grand announcements today, showing trainers how they can catch them all in brand new ways.
During the 2019 Pokémon Business Strategy Announcement conference, the Pokémon Company announced new side games for the Pokémon series, along with new mobile functionalities for Pokémon GO.
Detective Pikachu 2 for the Nintendo Switch was announced, and will follow the story of the original 2016 game for the Nintendo 3DS. It will be different than the ending of the film of the same name.
Pokémon Home will be a cloud-based service that will allow communication between Pokémon Bank, Pokémon GO, and the other Nintendo Switch games, Let’s Go and Sword/Shield. This will mark the first time Pokémon are available to access through all recent releases of the games over all of the console.
You will be able to trade within Pokémon Home, all through your phone. The cloud-based service releases in early 2020.
Also announced was a sleep monitoring device tied to Pokémon GO that will be developed by the same creators behind Magikarp Jump. A flashing flat Poké Ball will lay next to the player to track nighttime movements. The game is Pokémon Sleep, and it uses your time spent sleeping for gameplay.
At the event, the Pokémon Company said that Sleep will make sleeping fun, similar to how the GO game has made it fun for people to walk around the real world. It will release sometime in 2020 and was the weirdest announcement of the event.
Pokémon GO will evolve the Pokémon GO Plus accessory and the Poké Ball Plus with something called a Pokémon GO Plus +. It will follow the same functionality of the Pokémon GO Plus, and also track “simple information” about how you sleep. It tracks the players’ sleep via Bluetooth onto a smartphone. Sleeping Snorlax will be a common spawn in Pokémon GO to promote the Pokémon Sleep announcement.
Dena is developing a new mobile game called Pokémon Masters. It will feature past Gym Leaders and main characters from the main series video games as players fight turn-based triple battles. It will release sometime 2019, with more details to come during E3 2019.
Lastly, NetEase will be adding PvP and social systems to the Chinese release of Pokémon Quest.