Editor's Corner: Might Apple Arcade become the new home of Pokemon on the go?
Pika-woo?
As of right now, there's really only one place to play Pokemon games if you don't have a Nintendo device, and that's on mobile. It isn't just Pokemon Go that I'm talking about either - right now there are loads of Pokemon games available on the App Store and Google Play Store.
Need some names? Okay there's Pokemon Shuffle Mobile, Pokemon Magicarp Jump, Pokemon Duel, Pokemon Quest, Pokemon Trading Card Game Online, Camp Pokemon, and the recently soft-launched Pokemon Rumble Rush. That's seven games even if you don't count the behemoth that is Pokemon Go, which you almost certainly should, and another potential one on the way in the next year as well.
Pokemon-on-the-go?
It shouldn't come as too much of a surprise - mobile is where an awful lot of people consume their gaming content, and Pokemon is one of, if not the, biggest gaming franchises in the whole of the known universe. But mobile is missing one thing, and anyone with a penchant for Pokemon knows exactly what it is - a real Pokemon game.
Let me paint a picture for you - we've already written a lot about Apple Arcade, and how it stands to potentially revolutionise the way we play premium games for mobile. While the other games we've mentioned here are free to play, we can't see a core entry in the franchise going the same way, but it may well find a place in Apple's new subscription service.
Do we have anything to back this up with? Absolutely not - we're spitballing here, but if Apple wants to use games to get people to buy its products, then having the only exclusive Pokemon game not on a Nintendo console is definitely going to be a step towards that. In fact, we might go as far as calling that a massive leap in the direction that Apple seems to want to be heading in.
Arcade-mon
Will it actually happen? It's unlikely. But given the success of Pokemon Go - a game that's still at the forefront of the portable zeitgeist a good few years after it came out (I can look outside of my window most days and see a couple of players) - it's not a massive leap of the imagination.What do you think? Would a fully fledged new Pokemon adventure make you change your mind about Apple Arcade? Or would it just infuriate you more? Make sure you let us know your opinion in the comments section below.
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