New Pokemon Home Details Revealed

Pokemon fans went into today's Pokemon Direct expecting a lot of information on Pokemon Home, the upcoming service that will allow players to transfer Pokemon obtained from earlier games into Pokemon Sword and Shield. While The Pokemon Company did address Pokemon Home, the majority of the presentation was dedicated to the newly announced expansions for Pokemon Sword and Shield. Of course, since the new expansions will make a ton of old Pokemon available in Sword and Shield, players are going to want Pokemon Home even more than they did before. Thankfully, a few new details were revealed, including the service's February launch window!

The cloud-based Pokemon Home service will allow players to transfer Pokemon from Pokémon Go, Let's Go, Pikachu!, Let's Go, Eevee!, Pokémon Sword and Shield and, finally, Pokemon Bank. The latter option allows players to bring in Pokemon obtained in the 3DS games. It does take some steps, but Pokemon captured in every major franchise release since 2003's Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire will be able to be brought into Pokemon Home. That doesn't mean that all of these Pokemon can be transferred from Home into Sword and Shield; those Pokemon must exist in the Galar Pokedex before players can transfer them over. However, today's announcement that more pre-existing Pokemon are coming to the Nintendo Switch titles makes it likely that we will eventually see every previous Pokemon transferable. Game Freak seems to be on the case, at the very least!

Thanks to Pokemon Home, players won't have to purchase the new expansions to gain access to the earlier Pokemon coming to Sword and Shield. During today's Pokemon Direct, it was made clear that players can bypass the expansions altogether, but still transfer or trade for the earlier creatures. In an era where paywalls are fairly common occurrences, it's certainly nice to see Game Freak making an effort to expand the Pokedex to all players!

While the previous Pokemon storage device, Pokemon Bank, was exclusively available on 3DS, Pokemon Home will be accessible as a mobile app, allowing for greater access to the user's Pokemon collection.

According to today's Pokemon Direct, more information on Pokemon Home will arrive in the near future. Do you plan on downloading the upcoming app? What old Pokemon are you looking forward to using in Sword and Shield? Let us know in the comments or share your thoughts directly on Twitter at @Marcdachamp to talk all things gaming!