Nintendo's next Pokemon Direct confirmed for 9th January, 14:30 GMT / 6:30 PT / 9:30 ET

Nintendo has announced a Pokemon Direct that will take place on 9th January. This somewhat out of the blue announcement was first spotted by Serebii. The Direct will start at 6:30 am PT, so that's 9:30 am ET. and if you're UK-based like us then you'll want to tune in at around 2:30 pm for 20 minutes of Pokemon goodness. This will see around 20 minutes of Pokemon based news that will most likely cover Pokemon Home.

Pokemon Home is a cloud-based storage option that's set to replace Pokemon Bank when it eventually launches for iOS, Android and Switch. It will allow players to transfer Pokemon from Let's Go Eeevee/Pikachu, Sword and Shield and Pokemon Go to Home. It's the most logical thing to expect to be in the Direct since it was touted for an early 2020 release.

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There are currently several Pokemon that will only be available in Shield and Sword through Pokemon Home, including the starters for all of the regions outside of Galar. Naturally then, fans of the games are very keen to know when they can transfer their Pokemon over, myself included.

Beyond that, we might also get some new details on Pokemon Sleep, which was announced at the same conference as Pokemon Home over a year ago. It's a sleep monitoring game for iOS and Android that will interact with Pokemon Go in some fashion. It seems weird honestly, but I'm intrigued to see where it goes.

Of course, there's also a slight possibility we might get something more concrete about the heavily rumoured Pearl and Diamond remakes. Alternatively, there might just be a few events related to Shield and Sword thrown in too.

There's certainly no shortage of Pokemon games to play at the moment. The ever-popular Pokemon Go is still performing well, Pokemon Masters is slowly improving and we recently got stellar additions to the mainline series in Pokemon Shield and Sword. So I'm interested to see what this Direct brings.