Pokemon Home will have both free and premium price tiers, premium is $16 a year

The GTS is back as well

Game Freak and Nintendo have finally rolled the curtain back on Pokemon Home: the new transfer app due next month.

For starters, there’s going to be two plans: basic and premium. The basic plan is free, but you can only deposit 30 Pokemon in total, among other restrictions that you can read below in detail. The premium plan takes all of the training wheels off, allows a whopping 6,000 Pokemon to be banked, and will cost you either $2.99 a month or $15.99 a year, a far cry from the previous cheap 3DS Pokemon Bank service (which was five bucks a year). To transfer Pokemon from the Bank to Home, you need to subscribe to premium.

The plan is to still launch it next month, and when it arrives, it’ll also sport a mobile edition as well as the Switch app. Support for the pair of Let’s Go Switch games is re-confirmed, but once you move a creature from Let’s Go into Sword and Shield proper, it cannot go back. Trades can also happen on mobile devices through Wonder Box trades, the GTS (the classic feature that wasn’t in Sword and Shield by default), Room Trading and Friend Trading.

Here’s what Game Freak has to say about the National Pokedex: “Pokemon will be registered to the National Pokedex when users deposit them in the Boxes in Pokemon Home. If users deposit a Pokemon that can Mega Evolve or Gigantamax, then these forms will also be registered. In the National Pokedex, Trainers will be able to see Pokedex entries from various games in one place. With the mobile device version of Pokemon Home, users will also be able to search by Pokemon’s abilities or moves.”

And that’s mostly it! You can get mystery gifts through the mobile app, you can use the judge functionality to check the power level of your Pokemon and you can play with stickers and other little extras in the app. Pokemon Go support is planned for a later date.

It all sounds pretty cute except for that not-so-easily-digestible and greedy price point. They’re literally charging roughly the same price as a yearly Switch Online subscription for this.

Pokemon Home [Pokemon.com]