Pokémon is the largest-grossing media franchise of all time. It’s come to life in every form of media imaginable: Anime, video games, trading cards, etc. You name it? Pokémon probably has it. But did you know that the Pokémon games have a competitive scene? That’s right, there are people who battle head-to-head in the Pokémon video games for a living. Pretty cool right? 

Competitive Pokémon has two main categories: Singles and Doubles. 

Single battles require that two trainers battle each other with teams of six Pokémon. They each use their full teams of six to try and defeat their opponent with one Pokémon on the field at once. 

Double battles require that two trainers battle each other. However, instead of using your whole team, you pick four out of your six Pokémon to draft for that battle. Additionally, each player has two Pokémon out on the field at once. The winner is decided by who defeats their opponent’s total of four Pokémon.

While both singles and doubles each have competitive scenes, the Pokémon company only hosts double battle formats, officially. Single battles, however, still have their own community-run competitive scene. It’s called Smogon, named after the German name of their Pokémon mascot, Koffing. 

So can anyone go and become a competitive Pokémon player? Technically, yes. Realistically, no. Building a team for competitive Pokémon can be incredibly time-consuming. In competitive Pokémon, each Pokémon needs to contain different aspects that make them competitively viable. There are IVs (individual values) and EVs (effort values), which are internal numbers in each Pokémon that determine how high their stats can get. There are items, which could range anywhere from a slight stat boost to the crux of your strategy. There are abilities, which much like items, could either be the cherry on top or the foundation of your team’s game plan. And then there are the Pokémon’s moves, which they could get just through level up, or they may require you to breed the Pokémon with each other so that the resulting egg has what we call egg moves, which are moves that cannot be learned by that Pokémon but must be inherited from a parent Pokémon that knows that move.

If all of that sounded like a whole bunch of minutiae, that’s because it is. Competitive Pokémon has a lot of complexity and depth to it, and forgoing any of these factors for the sake of convenience could put you at a severe disadvantage compared to your opponents. 

This is why fans of competitive Pokémon tend to gravitate towards Pokémon Showdown, an unofficial, free, web-based Pokémon battle simulator that allows you to build your team and play against others online. It’s fun to use, but it’s nowhere near official. Most competitive Pokémon Players use Showdown for practicing or theory-crafting, due to its accessibility and lack of stakes.   

So why do I bring all of this up?

Competitive Pokémon is famous for being very time-consuming. Not because the actual act of battling others takes a while, but because the process of getting your Pokémon to the level that they are competitively viable could easily take hundreds of hours, and even more if you’re especially unlucky. If you work a 9-5 or are in school, you probably don’t want to spend the precious few hours of free time left in your day mindlessly riding a bicycle back and forth in a video game just trying to hatch eggs. This time commitment barrier to entry has made it very difficult for new people to get involved with competitive Pokémon, as the scene is predominantly either people who play Pokémon competitively for a living or content creators who have large fan bases of people who can help them out and do some of the tedious work for them.

Until now.

On Feb. 27, 2025, Pokémon had a Pokémon presents, which is a presentation on YouTube where they announce updates and new content for their ongoing titles, as well as tease future games. They announced Pokémon Champions, which is a brand new Pokémon game for Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android devices.  This isn’t your typical main series Pokémon game where you go through a new region and play through a story; This game is designed purely for battling. If this new game is a battle simulator as we suspect, but made in-house by the Pokémon company, it could be revolutionary for the competitive scene.

The fact that the new title is available on mobile devices implies that it wouldn’t be selling for the $60-$70 that brand-new video games are typically sold at. Additionally, the fact that the new game will be available on mobile devices means that if you are interested in competitive Pokémon but never got around to buying a switch, you don’t need to cough up $300 just to start your new hobby. This could allow people who love the franchise from other sources to experience competitive Pokémon and hopefully help competitive Pokémon become more mainstream and well-known.