If you have a subscription to Pokemon Bank, then you're in luck, as there's a new giveaway to those who use the service. If you have Sun, Moon, Ultra Sun, or Ultra Moon, you can get three free Pokemon; Decidueye, Incineroar, and Primarina. What's more, is that these Pokemon all come with their hidden abilities, too. If you log into Pokemon Bank before October 31, 2018, you can choose to receive all three creatures to your game, via Mystery Gift. If you don't have Pokemon Bank, it costs $4.99 a year to subscribe.

Decidueye's Hidden Ability is Long Reach, an Ability that no other obtainable Pokémon has had before. It allows the Pokémon to use its moves without making contact with its opponents, so Decidueye won't take damage from Abilities like Rough Skin or held items like Rocky Helmet.

Incineroar's Hidden Ability, Intimidate, lowers its opponent's Attack when Incineroar enters battle. With Intimidate, you can cut down on the attacking power of opponents that rely on physical attacks.

Primarina's Liquid Voice Hidden Ability has also never been available for a Pokémon until now. With Liquid Voice, all of Primarina's sound-based moves become Water type. Because these moves become the same type as Primarina, their power is increased!

Source

 

[InsaneNutter]

I got bored and done the math, with an investment of under £100 for a 4tb drive roughly 630153 people can use pokebank, off that same £100 investment Nintendo can pocket roughly £3,144,463 in fees from said subscribers. Yes that's over 3 million off that initial £100 investment.

I can tell you now Pokebank is not running on a 4TB usb hard drive connected to someones PC.

It will be running on multiple servers distributed around the world, probably on a Cloud platform like Azure which is not cheap. These servers will have access to high availability storage arrays consisting of many hard drives. Theirs also going to be database servers involved, integration with payment systems. All this data is then going to be backed up and replicated.

You then have the R&D costs of creating the service, the ongoing development, testing, server and bandwidth costs. That's before the wages of everyone involved need to be paid and tax on the profit is taken.

I don't doubt Nintendo is making a lot of profit off Pokebank when all the ongoing costs are accounted for, however they are also going to be spending significant amounts of money on it too.

 

[yusuo]

I can tell you now Pokebank is not running on a 4TB usb hard drive connected to someones PC.

It will be running on multiple servers distributed around the world, probably on a Cloud platform like Azure which is not cheap. These servers will have access to high availability storage arrays consisting of many hard drives. Theirs also going to be database servers involved, integration with payment systems. All this data is then going to be backed up and replicated.

You then have the R&D costs of creating the service, the ongoing development, testing, server and bandwidth costs. That's before the wages of everyone involved need to be paid and tax on the profit is taken.

I don't doubt Nintendo is making a lot of profit off Pokebank when all the ongoing costs are accounted for, however they are also going to be spending significant amounts of money on it too.

Oh no, I'm not that stupid to think that they're running the whole service off a portable hard drive stuck in the corner of their kyoto office, I know its a more than likely being run on a server farm somewhere in the world and obviously all the costs involved with implementing and researching the service would also be bought into dispute as well.

All I was suggesting is that this must have a low running cost in relation to the money it brings in

 

[InsaneNutter]

Oh no, I'm not that stupid to think that they're running the whole service off a portable hard drive stuck in the corner of their kyoto office, I know its a more than likely being run on a server farm somewhere in the world and obviously all the costs involved with implementing and researching the service would also be bought into dispute as well.

All I was suggesting is that this must have a low running cost in relation to the money it brings in

Oh indeed, I don't really want to pay for it however have ended up subscribing for 2 years now. If it allows for Pokemon to eventually be transferred to a version of the game on the Switch, which I guess it will do given the Switch is not backwards compatible at all, then i'll be subscribing for a year again. So that will be around £15 they have made from me.

 

[kingaz]

I remember them being put in my online boxes, and from there I could of course move (never said "copy") them to any arbitrary number of games...

Your memory is incomplete - you had to redeem them in-game first, then you could put them on Pokemon bank. In Gen VI, this was done by the weird Pokemon Link menu option. In Gen VII, it's just done via a mystery gift.

 

[deSSy2724]

So, if I choose to redeem it in Ultra Sun/Moon FIRST and transfer it over to my Pokebank, would I be able to transfer it then to the older games as well, Sun and Moon?