It appears that a new Pokemon mobile game is in development at The Pokémon Company. A LinkedIn hiring ad suggests that Nikolaus Davidson is leading the project. Davidson spent nearly five years as a lead designer and game director on Magic: Arena.
Gamnesia reported the hiring ad from The Pokémon Company earlier today. The ad is for a principal game designer, suggesting the title is still relatively early in development. Job tasks include defining “the ideal feature set” and “defining the vision” of the game. Davidson is the only profile attached to the ad, in its “meet the team” section. Davidson is named as a principal designer at the company, where he has been for a little over a year and a half.
The Pokémon Company has been chasing greater profits on mobile with titles including Pokemon Go and Pokemon Quest. Go has garnered the company, and partners at Niantic and Nintendo, millions of dollars since it launched in 2016. That title has been downloaded over 800 million times, and earned nearly a half billion dollars in less than three months after launch. Its push for more Pokemon mobile games comes at a time when mobile gaming rakes in billions of dollars through microtransactions and gacha systems.
Davidson, the only name attached to the project, was employed at Wizards of the Coast before joining The Pokémon Company in July last year. In his time there, he took Magic: Arena from concept to beta. Magic: Arena is a free-to-play version of the venerated Magic: The Gathering trading card game, and follows the same ruleset. Magic: Arena has been generally well-received by fans. This experience make it likely that this mysterious game could be a Pokémon Trading Card Game.
The Pokémon Trading Card Game launched in 1996, and was used in a Game Boy title of the same name. An online version of the Pokemon trading card game currently exists, and is a free-to-play version of the TCG.
