With the upcoming arrival of the Nintendo Switch 2, or whatever the company decides to call its next console, the immediate questions surrounding it in the eyes of fans and critics everywhere focus on hardware and software. We’ll focus on the software side of things for now because, for the majority of 2024, we’ve been hearing all sorts of reports, statements, rumors, and leaks about what games will be made for the Switch 2 and which ones are “likely to happen” for it. One of the few guarantees you could make is that Pokemon Gen 10 will be on the new system, if for no other reason than the incredibly dominant success of the franchise on the Switch over its 7+ years of life.
The question, though, is when will Gen 10 arrive? According to one leaker named Riddler Khu, the next generation of pocket monsters will drop in 2026, but they wouldn’t go into too much info about it after giving the date. Like many leakers, this one has a spotty history with the truth, so you might want to shield yourself from expectations by not fully trusting what this person claims. Or, at least wait until Nintendo or The Pokemon Company confirms that it’s happening.
If 2026 is the release window for Pokemon Gen 10, then that will likely raise some concerns with fans. The reason is that Gen 9 came out in 2022 alongside the first “Legends” title featuring Arceus, and while both games were great in their own ways, they both clearly had a “lack of polish” in certain areas that fans don’t want to see with Gen 10. Given that The Pokemon Company was working on the DLC for Gen 9 in most of 2023, that would mean that they likely only had about three years to make the new game for the new system, and that’s likely not enough time to make the game they want without various bugs and issues.
Another issue here is that Pokemon Legends Z-A was announced earlier this year, and we have no clear idea on what that game is and when it’ll show up outside of “2025.” So, if The Pokemon Company is working on that and Gen 10, that might be yet another “work overload” situation that could lead to a lack of quality, and fans don’t want that at all.
All of this is speculation, though, and there are still too many questions to be answered, so it’s just best to wait and see how it all unfolds.
