Pokemon Go and Pokemon Home will link up by the end of the year with in-game rewards

(Image credit: Nintendo / The Pokemon Company)

The link between Pokemon Go and Pokemon Home will be ready by the end of this year, opening the transfer route from Pokemon Go to Pokemon Sword and Shield.

Pokemon Home was billed as an all-in-one storage spot for Pokemon across games when it first went live earlier this year, and that vision always included Pokemon Go. The Pokemon Company president and CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara confirmed in the Pokemon Sword and Shield The Crown Tundra release date reveal stream that the company is planning to roll out the new feature for Pokemon Home's Switch and mobile apps soon.

As The Pokemon Company previously confirmed, transfers from Pokemon Go to Pokemon Home will be one-way only. Don't send your favorite walking buddy over unless you truly want them to start a new life on Switch. You can also only send over Pokemon that have already been registered in your Pokedex, or which have been obtained at least once in that game.

Caveats aside, you'll earn some special bonuses for sending critters over from Pokemon Go to Pokemon Home. That includes a Mystery Gift in Pokemon Go you can open to drop a Meltan onto your map, and a Mystery Gift in Pokemon Sword and Shield which gives you a special Melmetal that can Gigantamax.

Pokemon Home is available as a free app, but you can also upgrade to a Premium Plan subscription that increases the number of Pokemon you can store from 30 to 6,000, lets you Judge your Pokemon to get a detailed breakdown of their stats and natures, and more.

Of equal importance is the fact that Pokemon Sword and Shield is getting a bunch of hat-wearing Pikachus.

Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.

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