Pokémon found a way to get even bigger
Pokémon Champions is the dedicated battle-focused game the series needs.
Pokémon is the biggest entertainment franchise in the world. It’s bigger than Marvel, bigger than Star Wars, bigger than anything else you can imagine.
And I think it’s about to get even bigger.
On Tuesday, more details were revealed about Pokémon Champions, a battle-focused game coming in 2026 for Nintendo Switch, iOS and Android. There’s no adventure, no story and no catching Pokémon here. Those elements are entirely stripped away in favor of battling, whether ranked battles online or private ones with friends. And while you can use your existing Pokémon, much like the old Pokémon Stadium games, you can also build a team directly inside Champions.
In short, it is a standalone, dedicated Pokémon battle experience accessible to anyone. And I think it has the potential to open up Pokémon as an esport and remove many of the pain points that, to me, hamper the competitive side.
Battling is arguably the core gameplay element in the main Pokémon games. It’s what drives every other part of the game forward: you need to battle a Pokémon before you can catch it, battle to strengthen your team, battle to win Gym Badges to progress through the game. The Pokémon competitive scene is also built around battles.
Esports are growing rapidly. Saudi Arabia is currently hosting the Esports World Cup. There are continual calls to incorporate esports at the Olympic Games; it’s already a medal sport at the Asian Games. And competitive Pokémon is growing too. Last year’s Pokémon World Championships in Honolulu attracted 13,000 people; 20,000 are expected to attend this year’s event in Anaheim.
I’ve never felt like there was a good on-ramp from simply playing Pokémon into playing it competitively. In theory, it’s right there: in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet you can jump into a ranked battle against a human opponent from your in-game menu. But, in a game absolutely drowning in tutorials, there aren’t many that tell you how competitive Pokémon works, or the good strategies and concepts you should be looking out for. The single player game is so simple and the multiplayer one so deep that starting ranked battles feels less like making a step up and more like ascending a sheer cliff face.
That speaks to the fundamental tension between the competitive side of Pokémon and the single-player adventure side. The things that make one side good can hamper the other.
Pokémon is built around Generations, which begin with a new core series or mainline console game: Generation IX began with Scarlet & Violet for Nintendo Switch in 2022. Each Generation brings about a hundred new Pokémon, a new region (based on real places) and a new battle mechanic. Generation IX’s mechanic, Terastalization, allowed you to switch your Pokémon’s type to a hidden one, turning the tables in a battle.
Each time Pokémon introduces a new battle mechanic, it abandons the previous Generation’s mechanic. Generation VI introduced Mega Evolution; Generation VII dropped those for Z-Moves, which were dropped in Generation VIII for Dynamax, and so on. This makes sense for a single-player game: they want players to have a fresh experience and to focus on the new mechanic they’ve built, not stick to the old one. But this isn’t great from a competitive standpoint, because it causes a massive shake-up every few years where all the old strategies, items and knowledge are discarded.
The core games also don’t include every Pokémon anymore. There are now over a thousand Pokémon — 1,025, to be exact — and it’s become too difficult for the developers to rebuild, re-draw and re-animate all of them every few years. Again, it’s disruptive to competitive players: a Pokémon they’ve used so effectively in the past might not even be in the new game.
Sports thrive with stability. The more time you have with the same rules, the more time there is to develop deeper strategies and tactics. Imagine if football decided one season that you can play with two balls, then the next season removed that rule but allowed every team to play with two goalkeepers.
The biggest disruption of all is that, with each Generation, the entire player base has to move over to a new game. Competitive Pokémon battles take place inside the latest core series game. Every three years or so, players have to buy a new game and switch over if they want to continue to compete.
You might think that this isn’t a problem, because the core Pokémon games are really successful. Scarlet and Violet have sold almost 27 million copies on Switch, sitting 6th on the list of best-selling titles for the system ahead of another mainline game, Pokémon Sword and Shield.
But those numbers are dwarfed by other parts of Pokémon. Pokémon Go has been downloaded over one billion times and has 20 million weekly active players. Pokémon TCG Pocket, the new smartphone version of the trading card game, hit 100 million downloads in just 4 months. It shows there’s a huge latent audience for Pokémon out there, one that might not be interested in playing the adventure side of the game.
This is something you can see from the spate of disqualifications at the Pokémon World Championships in 2023. Competitive players aren’t catching and training Pokémon through the games like ordinary players; hacking Pokémon to get one with the optimal stats is widespread. These players are more focused on battle tactics than catching and training.
Champions makes this part of the game accessible to everyone. It can be the singular, focused Pokémon battle experience that goes beyond the core games, one that isn’t hampered by the needs of making a great single-player adventure. It’s a place where debates can be settled, matching Mega Evolution against Dynamax, pitting any Pokémon against each other.
And it brings people closer to the competitive side of Pokémon. There’s a huge latent audience for Pokémon out there that wasn’t playing (and probably never will play) the mainline games. Sure, not all of them will be competitive players. But some will.
Pokémon Champions has the potential to find these players and bring them into the fold. And that could take Pokémon to new heights.
Ravi Hiranand
