Before Thursday, the future of Pokémon's competitive scene looked bleak. The Video Game Championship series (VGC) relies on main series multiplayer Pokémon games to host its battles, and since the next Pokémon game is set to be a single-player affair, VGC was looking to fall back on Scarlet and Violet for the 2025 and 2026 championship series, after having already been in place for both 2023 and 2024.
Four years of competitive play with the same game was a nightmare for Pokémon pros. In the past, main series Pokémon games were used for two or three years in VGC, and even then they tended to get somewhat stale. There's only so many times players can use the same Pokémon with the same battle gimmicks before the scene becomes tiresome, with the meta settling into a rut and a few key Pokémon rising to the top and appearing on every team at every competition.
Thursday's Pokémon Day Presents livestream gave hope to competitive players that they'd be able to avoid this stale meta, thanks to the announcement of a brand-new game: Pokémon Champions. This game, set to be released on both Nintendo Switch and mobile devices, is a competitive battling simulator that uses the doubles format featured in VGC with a few twists.
The trailer for Pokémon Champions was short and minimal on details, but what fans saw was enough to get them excited. A dedicated app for online VGC battles means that, if adopted on the competitive esports circuit, the competitive Pokémon scene would no longer be coupled to new multiplayer games. This would let developer Game Freak take more time with new games, something that's sorely needed after the performance woes of recent titles.
It would also allow the VGC format to shake things up a bit each season. Instead of spending several years with the same battle gimmick and batch of Pokémon, each season could swap in a new set of Pokémon and a new battle gimmick. Instead of being stuck with Pokémon Scarlet and Violet's Terastalization for two more years, Champions could have a season with Mega Evolution followed by a season.
The introduction of a dedicated platform for battling competitively also fixes one of the biggest problems with Pokémon's esports scene: cheating. For as long as the series has had a competitive scene, players have been abusing methods for cutting down the grind of training up a competitively viable team. There have been countless scandals over the years with players of all skill levels -- from competitors at local tournaments to world champions -- using hacked or "genned" Pokémon. These Pokémon are usually created using external software to have the best stats and abilities possible, something that could otherwise take weeks or even months to do in-game. Moving competitive play to its own app means Game Freak would have total control over the Pokémon competing, eliminating unfair advantages, and hopefully building a competitive team would be quicker and easier than it ever was in the main series games.
With updates over time, adding more Pokémon and gimmicks introduced in future main series games, Pokémon Champions could grow to support even more options, with almost endless possibilities for the competitive scene. And with the app available on both Nintendo Switch and mobile, the player base for Pokémon esports seems poised to explode. With the barrier for entry now being a single app on the device in your pocket, rather than hundreds of dollars of Pokémon games, consoles, and subscriptions, anyone could become the next Pokémon World Champion.