The smash hit game Pokemon could be about to enter the metaverse, bringing its unique brand of gameplay that involves searching for, capturing, training and battling virtual creatures into the emerging world of Web3.
There hasn’t been any official announcement, but hints of The Pokemon Company’s plans were revealed in a recent job listing that requires the applicant to have extensive knowledge of Web3 and blockchains.
The listing can be found on The Pokemon Company’s Greenhouse page, and it states that the firm is looking for a “Corporate Development Principal”. At first glance, it seems like a fairly innocuous job title, but a look at the job description revealed that one of the primary qualifications candidates must possess is “deep knowledge and understanding of Web3, including blockchain technologies and NFT, and/or metaverse”.
The posting was first revealed by Twitter user pory_leeks, and suggests that The Pokemon Company is at least considering plans to launch its own metaverse and/or series of NFTs.
While there has been some criticism of the supposed plans, we should note that nothing has been stated by the company officially. It should also be noted that whoever lands the new role will be tasked with “corporate strategy” responsibilities, including advising the executive leadership team. As such, it’s most likely that Pokemon is merely exploring the possibilities of Web3, for now.
That said, there are lots of reasons to consider Pokemon as a good fit for the metaverse and NFTs. Pokemon Go, which was released in 2016, is one of the most popular smartphone games of all time, with sales surpassing $5 billion in 2021. Its success comes from its novel use of augmented reality, which overlays a graphics-based computer game world on top of the real world, encouraging people to go out and explore. Players have to physically travel to different locations to track down virtual Pokemon creatures using the app’s AR capabilities.
The metaverse itself is a virtual world that also encourages exploration, albeit only on a digital basis, so it could provide an enticing, immersive world for Pokemon players. NFTs fit nicely with Pokemon too. By integrating NFT Pokemon, the game’s developers would be able to introduce the concept of entirely unique Pokemon for every player, complete with individual attributes and rarity traits. They could even be bought and sold on open marketplaces, adding a new dynamic to the game.
It remains to be seen if Pokemon would build its own metaverse or simply integrate with an existing one. The latter option might be easier, because building a mateverse from scratch would likely take years and require the company to hire many more developers.
There are some good candidate metaverses that Pokemon could explore. Existing metaverses such as Decentraland and The Sandbox have been established for years and have built up loyal communities, though it remains to be seen if they’d be receptive to Pokemon getting a foothold. A better possibility might be the upcoming metaverse Peer, which is creating an augmented reality-based virtual world that, much like Pokemon, overlays itself onto the real world. Peer, which recently hired an expert team of 3D map designers, allows users to explore the metaverse as they travel through the real world, overlaying games and 3D objects onto reality. Users can travel to different places, create memories and share experiences, or pick up and place 3D objects for others to collect.
Peer is also developing its own VR headset for a more immersive AR experience, and its roadmap includes an NFT minting engine that would make it very simple for the game’s developers to create unique, tokenized Pokemons and distribute them across its 3D maps.
Pokemon’s gameplay would be an ideal fit for Peer’s AR metaverse, and it’s notable that Peer is open to the idea of third-party developers building games for it. If Pokemon were to build a game in Peer’s AR metaverse, it could spark another wave of Pokemon mania as users scramble to locate the rarest and most unique NFTs hidden around their cities.
Then again, Pokemon might instead choose to build its own metaverse. Niantic, the developer of Pokemon Go, last year raised $300 million in funding and said it plans to use some of that cash to invest in a metaverse that was promised to be “just like the real world”. Like Peer, its proposed metaverse would also incorporate AR, so we can assume that it too, would also overlay the physical world. That said, it has never been made clear if Niantic’s metaverse would integrate with Pokemon, or serve some other purpose.
What is perfectly clear is that NFTs have emerged as a growing trend in Japan, with all manner of novel use cases being tested recently. Given that Pokemon isn’t all that far off from being a metaverse already, it makes sense that the game’s developers would want to explore the concept some more.