Pokemon Home

Pokémon Home has finally gone live

Pokémon Home is a new platform for cataloging and trading Pokémon across different games – and has just gone live.

Pokémon Sword & Shield and Pokémon Let’s Go, Pikachu! & Let’s Go, Eevee! are supported, and the app is available for Switch, as well as Android and iOS devices.

Latest Home updates:

Professor Grand Oak is the face of the app

You’re rewarded a level 5 Pikachu the first time you open Home

Transferring from Pokémon Bank earns you 3000 Home Points

You can release Pokémon en masse through the app

Hyper Training isn’t transferring from Bank to Home, probably a bug

35 previously unavailable Pokémon can be transferred to Sword & Shield

Open home on mobile to receive Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle

Earn a Pichu for completing a Mystery Gift challenge on mobile

Pokédex cataloging: If you have a battle form-only Pokémon, it will be added automatically to the Home Pokédex. If it’s a Gigantamax variant, you need to transfer it to Home to get it registered. Any forms catalogued in Bank will transfer to Home along with the Pokémon.

Time For A Quick Daily Quiz?

Which of the following games was NOT developed by Edmund McMillen?

The Binding of Isaac

Cave Story

Super Meat Boy

The End is Nigh

The answer will be revealed at the bottom of today’s issue. Join up with our community on Twitter and Facebook to discuss what the answer could be.

Daily Fact

Ninja Gaiden difficulty was an accident

The NES version of Tecmo’s Ninja Gaiden was famously difficult, and the steep challenge was actually accidental.

A glitch caused you to restart at the beginning of the sixth act if you died fighting any of the last three bosses. Game artist Masato Kato revealed that the team was surprisingly happy with the ‘problem’ as it made the final part of the game more tense – and fun.

Game director Hideo Yoshizawa put greater emphasis on the NES version’s story than in the arcade version. The NES version of Ninja Gaiden was a ‘Tecmo Theater’ title, featuring 20 minutes of anime-style cut scenes.

Join up with our community on Twitter and Facebook to discuss today’s fact.

Indie Games Median

Indie games on Steam ‘unsustainable’ with median of just $1,400 over 5 years

A visualization showing various data about Steam games is making the rounds.

The numbers paint a bleak picture of the indie game market, showing that the top 25 percent of indie games in 2019 earn a median revenue of $12,000, which is dramatically down from $110,000 in 2013 . This is “obviously not sustainable” according to indie studio Grey Alien Games.

Data highlights:

Steam library has grown to 30,000 games

Number of new indie releases remain high, but are ‘levelling off’

Median income for indies has decreased since 2013 peak

Median indie revenue in 2013 was around $110,000, with the top 5% earning a median of $590,000

Median indie revenue in 2019 was $12,000 in the top 25%, and $413,000 in the top 5%.

Steam blows cold: Releasing a game on Steam is in no way a guarantee of sales. As the number of releases have increased, it has gotten harder to stand out – although the top 5 percent still earn a healthy amount, showing that it’s mostly the lower end of the market that has suffered from the glut of releases.