TL;DR
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Now that the (free) Delta Gameboy Emulator is available on 1.46B iPhones, The Pokémon Company is incentivized to engage its newly hired ‘web3 expert’ and bring its classics onchain to distract from emulation.
Full Story
It’s time we update our list, titled:
“Evidence and contributing factors that point towards a web3 Pokémon game becoming a thing”
(It’s a working title, don’t @ us).
👉 Here’s what we had up until recently…
1/ Pokémon is perfectly suited for web3 based in-game economies.
You catch a Pokémon → it’s minted as an NFT → you can sell it on the open market (like a digital version of Pokémon cards) → every time a sale is made, The Pokémon Company gets a cut.
The player takes the lions share of profits for each individual sale, while The Pokémon Company earns their dollars through trading volume.
(Everybody wins, hugs, and lives happily ever after).
2/ In March, The Pokémon Company posted a new job listing, calling for a web3 expert, to advise the company’s leadership on web3 strategy.
(Huge! But we haven’t heard anything since).
👉 Here’re two new factors that might push The Pokémon Company to making this dream a reality…
3/ Atari is bring its classics onchain (we wrote about it yesterday)
Atari is helping to prove that game companies can effectively monetize their classic titles onchain.
But why would The Pokémon Company want to monetize their games onchain?
They have a pretty solid track record of being able to modernize and re-release their old titles on Nintendo…
4/ The (free) Delta Gameboy emulator went live on the App Store a few months back
That means 1.46 billion iPhone users can now play any Gameboy, GBA, and/or DS version of Pokémon on their phones, for free.
We can’t imagine The Pokémon Company liking this.
To combat it, they’d need to give gamers an experience they can’t get on an emulator…
Like, say, the ability to collect, trade, and sell the Pokémon they collect in-game.
Is it still a bit of a pipe dream? Yes.
Are we going to cling to it with blind hope? Also yes.
