Pokemon Sleep Will Help You Catch Zs

The Pokemon Company has announced a new mobile game that will track your sleeping patterns with the help of a new periphery device. At a press conference held in Japan earlier today, the Pokemon Company announced Pokemon Sleep, a new Pokemon game intended to do for sleep what Pokemon Go did for walking. With the help of a new device called the Pokemon Go Plus + (which resembles a flattened Poke Ball), Pokemon Sleep will monitor your sleep patterns and adapt its gameplay accordingly.

While the Pokemon Company showed off the Pokemon Go Plus + and revealed that it will work similarly to the Pokemon Go Plus and Poke Ball Plus devices (both of which have functionality with Pokemon Go), they didn't give many details about Pokemon Sleep other than that it would encourage players to get a good night's sleep. We do know that Pokemon Sleep is being developed by the makers of Pokemon: Magikarp Jump, so we're guessing that the game with have some idle functionality similar to that game. Maybe getting more sleep will encourage more types of Pokemon to visit your game, or maybe Pokemon will only train for battle at night.

At the root of Pokemon Sleep is a desire for the Pokemon Company to improve their fans' lives. Pokemon Go encouraged players to walk a lot more (with noticeable health benefits) and so the Pokemon Company wanted to encourage players' health by improving their sleep in some way. The move also seems to indicate the Pokemon Company moving from a gaming brand to a lifestyle brand, as it seems to be moving in the direction that many tech giants have gone with their smartphone health monitoring technology. If the FitBit can make getting thousands of steps a day fun, why can't the Pokemon Company make getting 8 hours of sleep a little more enjoyable?

We'll have more details about Pokemon Sleep and the new Pokemon Go Plus + device when it's released.