Pokemon Home Will Give Players a Cloud-Based Location to Store All Their Pokemon

The Pokemon Company has announced Pokemon Home, a new cloud-based service that will let players store their Pokemon from various Pokemon games. Pokemon Home will serve as a spiritual sequel to the Pokemon Bank, a cloud-based service that allowed players to store Pokemon from Pokemon X & Y and other Pokemon 3DS games. In addition to being able to transfer Pokemon from the Pokemon Bank, players can also transfer Pokemon from various Nintendo Switch Pokemon games as well as Pokemon Go into the service. Players will be able to access Pokemon Home from their smartphone and will even be able to trade using the Pokemon Home mobile app.

Pokemon Home seems to solve some of the problems posed by the franchise's growth onto multiple platforms. While players could conceivably transfer their Pokemon from Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire all the way to Pokemon Sun and Moon, there was no way to get those older Pokemon over to the upcoming Pokemon Switch games. By using a cloud-based service that links to the Nintendo 3DS Pokemon Bank app, players can now freely transfer all their older Pokemon into a single location where they could then hypothetically be inserted into the upcoming Pokemon Sword and Shield games.

Interestingly, transferring Pokemon from Pokemon: Let's Go, the 3DS Pokemon games, or Pokemon Go appears to be a one-way transfer. A chart displayed by the Pokemon Company seems to indicate that players can transfer their Pokemon from other Pokemon games to Pokemon Home, but they can only transfer Pokemon from Pokemon Home to the upcoming Pokemon Sword & Shield games. This is similar to the permanent transfers of Pokemon from older Pokemon games to newer Pokemon games - once a Pokemon departs a game for a newer platform, they could never return.

Pokemon Home will be released in early 2020.