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We've got new details regarding the Pokemon Home service, which will allow players to transfer some of their favorite Pokemon to the latest games. The service is set to launch next month, in February 2020, with both a free and a paid plan available. For free, players can deposit 30 Pokemon, have three creatures in the Wonder Box at once, and can participate in "room trades". The premium version of Pokemon Home will cost $15.99 a year, and will expand upon the features of the basic plan, such as raising the limit of maximum deposited Pokemon from 30 to 6,000, having 10 Pokemon in the Wonder Box at once, being able to use Pokemon Bank, and giving access to the Judge function, which lets you see your Pokemon's EV's and IV's at a glance.

Pokemon Bank, a service that also previously required a yearly payment, will be made free for a month, to celebrate the launch of Pokemon Home, and made it easier for premium players to import their Pokemon into the new program.

The Wonder Box is a feature that acts as a larger-scale Wonder Trade function, trading selected Pokemon randomly across the globe, even when you're not using the Pokemon Home app. Meanwhile, the GTS will be making a comeback, and just like the older games, you'll be able to deposit a set Pokemon and request a trade with someone for another Pokemon, under certain conditions. Room Trades are similar to Wonder Trades, but you'll join together with a set of 20 players, who will each randomly trade their Pokemon. Players on the free plan can partake in these trades, but only paid members can host them.

Instead of receiving carting your Switch to events, Mystery Gifts can be obtained both locally and online through the Pokemon Home app as well.

Source

 

[Lodad]

Collect animals, camp with them, duke it out via Dragon Quest-like battle system, become a champ with lotsa badges. It's all there is to it basically =)

Why are you selling my favorite eugenics/dogfighting/child endangerment/10-dimensional rock-paper-scissors/crime fighting simulator series so short?

Seriously though, pokemon is dead to me. Everything everyone has said negatively here rings true, the nickel-and-dime tactics, fleecing their customers for features that were all included in the game when it used to only cost $40 at release, holding back classic pokemon to sell as DLC, leaving regions unfinished so that they can be part of the paid DLC as well... How sad.

All why I'm giving Temtem a shot to see where it ends up.

 

[Kurt91]

If it were me, I'd probably make the free version have separate slots for each Pokemon (1 slot for Pikachu, 1 slot for Ditto, etc.) and you got one of each slot for free. If you're a casual player who just wants to import their collection, that should be good enough. You'd also get access to online trading.

If you paid for a premium version, you got unlimited space for each type of Pokemon, as well as easy-viewing EV, IV, and all of the other little complexities. Probably include some way of manipulating these as well. (Copy the candy mechanic from Go, but each Pokemon that's traded for Candy gives you a different Candy depending on their Nature, and each type of Candy provides an EV or IV stat instead of EXP. Now these guys are driven to mass-catch each type of Pokemon even if they can manipulate a single one's stats directly. You want to make it even more grindy, you could make higher-level Pokemon produce higher-quality Candy that's needed to manipulate stats after they hit a certain point... Oh god, I've basically turned Pokemon into Disgaea. Cool.)That way, the premium players are the ones who are the diehard competitive players who want to nitpick every little aspect of their creatures and micro-manage everything. These guys are probably certain to pay you constantly for the service and probably never stop subscribing since they'd take so long to perfect everything that the next game would come out by the time they're done, and it's time for them to start all over again.

Hell, at that point, it would be a bonus on GameFreak's side to change up which Pokemon appear in each game, because these hyper-competitive players would be driven to perfect every single Pokemon in their collection so they'd be ready regardless of what the next game's roster was going to be. These people paying for subscriptions would stay customers FOREVER!

 

[chaoskagami]

$15.99 a year for ~3mo of cloud storage. Good move game freak.

Let's frame this differently: A single Pokemon is like, what, 688 bytes? You're paying $16 per year for slightly less than 5MB of storage. That's what makes this really not funny. Especially when the Pokemon Box existed in the GC era that could store 1500 on a memory card, and memory cards truly were that small. Suppose there are a million people with accounts; that can be entirely stored on one 8TB disk drive, which costs a grand total to Nintendo of $140 especially since they probably host the servers themselves.

 

[chartube12]

Let's frame this differently: A single Pokemon is like, what, 688 bytes? You're paying $16 per year for slightly less than 5MB of storage. That's what makes this really not funny. Especially when the Pokemon Box existed in the GC era that could store 1500 on a memory card, and memory cards truly were that small. Suppose there are a million people with accounts; that can be entirely stored on one 8TB disk drive, which costs a grand total to Nintendo of $140 especially since they probably host the servers themselves.

you also need nintendo switch online for this to work. home is essentially an add-on for it. I fully expect something online-ish to get added for animal crossing with a separate fee and/or 64/gamecube games to be a separate fee as well. Bringing the total closer or even over 60 a year. Nintendo is selling it’s online service l’carte!

 

[Seliph]

So lemme get this straight
Pokemon Sword and Shield are 60 dollars each
So you spend 60 dollars on one of the games
The DLC for each game is 30 dollars
So you spend 30 dollars on the DLC, and now you've spent 90 dollars on this game
But wait! Each DLC is different, so you should probably buy the other one while you're at it.
But wait again! The DLC is version exclusive, so now you gotta buy the other game AND the other DLC to get the full experience.
Now you've spent $180 dollars.
But wait!!!!! You wanna use Pokemon Home premium? That'll be 16 dollars yearly, PLUS 5 extra dollars yearly if you want Pokemon Bank.
Now you've spent 201 dollars.
BUT WAIT!!!
You can't even USE those features without an online membership, so that's 20 more bucks yearly.
That's 221 dollars in total.
221 dollars if you want the full Pokemon experience on the Switch.
T w o h u n d r e d t w e n t y o n e d o l l a r s.
That's 3 better games you could buy.
That's 2 new pro-controllers.
That's 1 Switch Lite.

Bruh.

This isn't even considering the fact that the total will be even higher by 41 dollars every year, and the fact that Game Freak will likely shove out some new DLC in the future.
No, I will not be spending 221 dollars on content that should have been in the base game.
Yes, I regret paying 60 dollars for a game so obviously rushed.

 

[AbyssalMonkey]

Wow... I was thinking the Pokemon Home was going to cost $20 a year jokingly in my head. I was close... $16 a year. I mean you can spend like $3 a month, but this is messed up.

GTS and online were FREE before SwSh and Switch. I blame this on Nintendo cause they can't do online right while Sony and Microsoft are BETTER in that regard. Not perfect, but better.

But GameFreak is also in the wrong for cutting the feature out and selling us back at a price. At least there's a FREE version, but it's so gutted what's the point?

Also, someone stated you need Nintendo Switch Online to have Home be usable with SwSh. I don't see that in this article unless it was stated somewhere else. Can someone confirm this please?

I've said this before when people bitched and moaned about the big N making people pay for online: servers aren't free, and neither is storage. You are buying an add-in service on their proprietary platform. They should be allowed to recoup ongoing running and maintenance costs at the very least, and potentially make a margin on it. I said the same thing when they made the online service cost money: you are connecting through their service for everything, whether it be the Splatoon P2P matchmaking service (which requires some sort of centralized server) or their cloud save service. I imagine the only thing that doesn't directly connect to their servers is browser traffic, and I'm willing the bet the browser is in a sandbox now to help prevent exploits.

Let's frame this differently: A single Pokemon is like, what, 688 bytes? You're paying $16 per year for slightly less than 5MB of storage. That's what makes this really not funny. Especially when the Pokemon Box existed in the GC era that could store 1500 on a memory card, and memory cards truly were that small. Suppose there are a million people with accounts; that can be entirely stored on one 8TB disk drive, which costs a grand total to Nintendo of $140 especially since they probably host the servers themselves.

Now this is the real kicker. $16? For just this? That's pretty laughable. I could see them making a large profit margin off this at even only $3 a year*. Do some Nintendo branding magic and call it the pokemon care fee, and most of the bad PR for making it paid goes away.

Now the argument about these types of servers being paid for by the cost of the game becomes tricky if people who haven't bought a game in several years continue to use the service, effectively becoming freeloaders, so I can understand the idea of wanting to make it a subscription, but, so help me god, I might actually be advocating for new game activation codes in that case. I never thought I would come up with a reasonable explanation for them existing, but here we are.

*I would imagine that transfer fees would start to serious eat into the profits below this point. Small money transactions are penalized pretty heavily by credit card companies. They probably couldn't bundle it together with NSO for company financial subdivision reasons, so there's probably no real way to cut those fees.

 

[DANTENDO]

Pokemons new theme tune

 

[Xzi]

Honestly premium is something that should be included with a Nintendo Online subscription. Killed their opportunity for a value add there.

 

[AbyssalMonkey]

Honestly premium is something that should be included with a Nintendo Online subscription. Killed their opportunity for a value add there.

Like I said earlier, I wouldn't be surprised if they can't. Because the Pokemon Company isn't a wholly owned subsidiary of Nintendo, and Nintendo is the one providing the service, merging the two into a deal might become complicated for the financial subdivision between the companies, considering they are technically two different entities.

 

[Xzi]

Like I said earlier, I wouldn't be surprised if they can't. Because the Pokemon Company isn't a wholly owned subsidiary of Nintendo, and Nintendo is the one providing the service, merging the two into a deal might become complicated for the financial subdivision between the companies, considering they are technically two different entities.

Even if it meant another $5 or $10 added to the yearly price, I'm sure some sort of split could've been worked out to the satisfaction of GameFreak, The Pokemon Company, and Nintendo. Managing two wholly separate subscription plans is something that only super hardcore Pokemon fans might be willing to tolerate, whereas a combo package would appeal to a much wider audience.

 

[Goku1992A]

Guys should stop complaining since they do offer a free version. Have you played COD, Forza, DBZ Xenoverse and etc it has always been alot of microtransactions in that game. I'm just happy I can trade over my my Pokemon let's go to my sword. I kinda do agree this should have been included with the Nintendo online but it isn't. I been playing pokemon games since 1997 so I seen the changes in the game.

If you guys haven't read articles Nintendo has made over a billion dollars in mobile gaming so stuff like this isn't going away soon. Either pay or just whip out your latest pokehex

 

[grey72]

Pay 16$ for a """"service""""" that's been a part of all of the (66% cheaper) games for the past decade. I'd say PMC/Nintendo went full EA but there's people willing to pay up in this very thread so evidently I'm the moron here.

 

[Deleted member 507653]

I know people who've spent hundreds on CANDY CRUSH. Wouldn't be surprised that people would dish out for this too (but like why tho).

 

[AkiraKurusu]

Pokemon files are roughly ~1KB in size each, meaning storing 6000 Pokemon should be trivial for any modern storage device - paying $16 for ~6000 KB and the return of features that were bastardised in the actual Switch games is ludicrous.

If I wanted, I could dump the entirety of my Let's Go Eevee (preowned, because not going to give The Pokemon Company a cent for this travesty) box on my PC, for free, and I'd still have plenty of space for other files.

Heck, the 3DS homebrew guys developed a free Bank replacement that stored Pokemon on the SD card, and also allowed for decent Pokemon and Bag editing. THAT was useful, and what Bank should've been (minus the save editing part, of course).

 

[campbell0505]

I am probably not going to pay for the premium tier. Heck, I probably won’t be able to use it, since most Nintendo apps on iOS have jailbreak detection.

 

[DarthDub]

I'm so glad I stopped playing Pokemon on the 3DS.

 

[slaphappygamer]

I’ve never played Pokémon. Please help this male over 40. What is a “GTS”?

 

[Searinox]

This pricing plan is cancer. Eat a dick Nintendildo!

 

[Pipistrele]

Why are you selling my favorite eugenics/dogfighting/child endangerment/10-dimensional rock-paper-scissors/crime fighting simulator series so short?

Seriously though, pokemon is dead to me. Everything everyone has said negatively here rings true, the nickel-and-dime tactics, fleecing their customers for features that were all included in the game when it used to only cost $40 at release, holding back classic pokemon to sell as DLC, leaving regions unfinished so that they can be part of the paid DLC as well... How sad.

All why I'm giving Temtem a shot to see where it ends up.

I don't get the TemTem hype personally. As much as everyone seems to praise it to be the next "Pokemon killer while Pokemon is screwing up", it doesn't appear to be all that much better - again, less monsters, worse graphics, similarly simplistic animations, and relatively uninspired mon designs and artistic direction. Besides, I'm sceptical of MMO aspects already: from ability of small indie studio to carry an ambitious MMO (projects that fail all too often, as NerdSlayer can attest), to the fact that consistent updates will require consistent income (which means microtransactions and subscriptions are most likely to follow). I think a lot of support for TemTem comes out of pure spite for Pokemon, which is understandable, but won't do TemTem any favor once people chill down and realize that there are tons of better mon games than both Pokemon and TemTem.

So lemme get this straight
Pokemon Sword and Shield are 60 dollars each
So you spend 60 dollars on one of the games
The DLC for each game is 30 dollars
So you spend 30 dollars on the DLC, and now you've spent 90 dollars on this game
But wait! Each DLC is different, so you should probably buy the other one while you're at it.
But wait again! The DLC is version exclusive, so now you gotta buy the other game AND the other DLC to get the full experience.
Now you've spent $180 dollars.
But wait!!!!! You wanna use Pokemon Home premium? That'll be 16 dollars yearly, PLUS 5 extra dollars yearly if you want Pokemon Bank.
Now you've spent 201 dollars.
BUT WAIT!!!
You can't even USE those features without an online membership, so that's 20 more bucks yearly.
That's 221 dollars in total.
221 dollars if you want the full Pokemon experience on the Switch.
T w o h u n d r e d t w e n t y o n e d o l l a r s.
That's 3 better games you could buy.
That's 2 new pro-controllers.
That's 1 Switch Lite.

Bruh.

This isn't even considering the fact that the total will be even higher by 41 dollars every year, and the fact that Game Freak will likely shove out some new DLC in the future.
No, I will not be spending 221 dollars on content that should have been in the base game.
Yes, I regret paying 60 dollars for a game so obviously rushed.

I mean, if you're a compulsive buyer, that is - most sane people will buy a single copy, maybe DLC, and a subscription if they're really into the game. Even for hardcore gamers, there's no good reason to buy everything, as you suggested above. Counting in online membership is also weird, since you kinda need that for every online Switch game (including "better" ones).

 

[MagnesG]

There's a free version you know with most of the features included.

I don't know what to say anymore.