While not a new Pokemon game, Pokemon Home will bring those other Pokemon experiences together. It will be a cloud-based service that will link different generations of Pokemon in one simple place. The Pokemon Company plans to launch this sometime on the Switch and smart phones in early 2020.
Players will able to trade their Pokemon to Pokemon Home from Pokemon Go, Pokemon Let’s Go Eevee, Pokemon Let’s Go Pikachu, Pokemon Sword, and Pokemon Shield as well as the 3DS Pokemon Bank. This service will “support updates for future Pokemon content,” which likely means that it will be forward compatible.
Trading is also possible through the app via the internet with friends or strangers or if you’re nearby other trainers. Managing Director Junichi Masuda described this as a way to give Pokemon a home but also as a way to connect players to each other and stated that is a “place where all Pokemon can gather.”
Pokemon Home seems like an upgraded and expanded version of the Pokemon Bank, which was a paid app on the 3DS that allowed trainers to deposit, manage, and store Pokemon on the internet. This even worked with the 3DS Virtual Console versions of the earliest Pokemon games, meaning players could transfer their Charmander from Pokemon Red all the way to Pokemon X. But not every Pokemon from those early games could be transferred.
