Pokemon Home Launches in February and Nintendo has finally rolled out more info about the service. Like Pokemon Bank for 3DS, Pokemon Home is cloud storage for your digital creatures allowing you to capture store and move them between supported titles. Pokemon Home will launch with both a Switch and mobile version that connect to your Nintendo Account and share info across both versions. Wondertrade and the GTS both make their highly anticipated comeback with Pokemon Home which is a feature that has been sorely missing in Pokemon Sword and Shield. The service will be subscription-based with an annual cost of $15.99 or $2.99 for 30 days/$4.99 for 90 days. A stripped-back version of the service will also be available for free. You can check out the differences in the image below.
When the service launches it will be compatible with Sword and Sheild, Let’s Go Pikachu and Let’s Go Eevee, and Pokemon Bank with Pokemon Go features coming at a later time. Pokemon that appear in Sword and Shield will be freely transferable between Pokemon Home. Pokemon transferred from the Let’s Go games can be transferred between Pokemon Home and themselves but once a Pokemon is put into Sword and Shield it can never be put back into Let’s Go. The story is similar for Pokemon Bank transfers, once a Pokemon is moved from the older 3DS service it can never be put back. As a way to help users get their Pokemon transferred between services, Pokemon Bank and Pokemon Transporter are going to be free for a month. It has yet to be revealed how Pokemon Go will factor into everything.
The Pokemon Home service is going to be a must for most long term Pokemon fans, sadly the price hike compared to Pokemon Bank is a bit of a joke. At least the free version will work well enough to get all Sword and Shield compatible Pokemon off your older systems and games. Plus you will still be able to do trades so as far as I am concerned, there will be plenty use even for the free version. But now I am curious, how many of you out there are anywhere close to having 6000 Pokemon?!
