Regardless of the current status of a console’s life cycle, one thing remains the same. Nintendo is always experimenting with hardware, and it is relatively common to see the company filing applications for new patents. That said, the latest example of this specifically relates to the Pokemon franchise.
Nintendo has filed an application for a new patent that involves “a sophisticated server infrastructure designed to store and update individual Pokemon data seamlessly between games”. The core of this infrastructure involves Pokemon parameters that are universal, which includes species, types, moves, effort values (EVs), and experience. There is also “inherant areas” for more game-specific attributes, events, and memories. It sounds like an expansion of Pokemon HOME. Nevertheless, if there are any further developments involving this, we’ll let you know.
I don’t always put much stock into patents. There are times when they are more or less exactly what will appear in-game (Tears of the Kingdom comes to mind), and there are times where they just never end up using the patent in any discernable way.
That said, this time around the patent in question is surprisingly descriptive, and it is a reasonable goal to strive towards with the Pokémon-series of games (and is something they’ve basically done before, in a more primitive form; transferring) so I believe it’s quite likely that this is something we will see next autumn, assuming the next mainline game(s) release around then.
I know it’s unlikely, but I hope this somehow has to do with giving us gens 1-3 on NSO and letting us trade/battle with friends.
I’m not sure you can patent storing and acessing data on the cloud.
All I want in Home is the ability to put a Pokemon in-between 2 and have the rest automatically shift to the right. There’s no reason why I should have to spend 2 hours of my time shifting Pokemon every time a new form releases or if I get a new shiny for it to be in the right spot in my living dex. I got a few shiny Wooper to be added in, and only reason why I haven’t yet is because I’ll need to shift 7 gens worth of Pokemon to the right before I can finally organize them into the correct box. Takes forever.
To me, it almost sounds like a system to get around the problem birthed from Dexit. If they can make a system that allows them to easily add 100% of the Pokémon from previous entries into the new entries without having to recreate the models, etc, they won’t have to cut the number of past gen Pokémon down to a few for the next entry.