What You Need to Know:
- We'll cut straight to the chase with this one and say that, last night's Pokemon Presentation was definitely shocking in a multitude of ways. For starters, many fans were highly anticipating that various announcements would be made and unfortunately, we all stayed up late (or woke up early depending on your time zone) to see only one reveal: Pokemon UNITE.
- What's Pokemon UNITE exactly? Wellm, it's a brand new 5-on-5 team experience that's very similar to the likes of League of Legends, Dota, and other MOBA games on the market, with Chinese mammoth company Tencent leading the project. Now, this is certainly great news as it allows the Pokemon brand to expand into a realm where, for the greater portion of a decade, Riot Games' League of Legends has dominated the MOBA eSports scene with massive prize pools for players. With Pokemon being such a beloved franchise for millions of fans around the world, and Tencent being a giant in its home country, this will allow more fans in China to really become more involved in the Pokemon brand which will only help Game Freak to expand tremendously.
- This announcement was of course met with mixed responses, with the live reveal itself receiving well over 60k dislikes on Twitter, creating arguably the most disliked Pokemon video of all time on the YouTube platform. We may be exaggerating a little bit there but it was made very clear that Pokemon fans weren't impressed by the single announcement made, and perhaps if more than just Pokemon UNITE was unveiled, perhaps people wouldn't mind so much. The idea of Pokemon eSports to us sounds quite intriguing and I for one will dip my hands into the MOBA cookie jar, since there's a lot of potential for this game.
- It's free-to-play, cross-platform, and you can grab it on either your Nintendo Switch or mobile device, which is pretty stellar. The only thing we can do for now is just wait and see how it all turns out but for now, we're a but excited to see where Pokemon and eSports takes us! What are your thoughts?
I for one support this because even though it goes beyond the conventional styles of Pokemon, it allows for more diversity and long term growth for the franchise.
Well said bee-kun. Sure, a lot of fans will be upset but in the end, the Pokemon brand will continue to shine on for many more years now.