A battle game designed to outlive the usual hype cycle
Pokémon Champions is not being pitched as another one-and-done adventure. According to producer Masaaki Hoshino, the upcoming battle-focused game is being built to last “basically forever,” assuming the franchise itself keeps marching on in its familiar, unhurried way.
That long-term plan comes with a very large number attached to it. Hoshino suggested that the series could one day reach “2,000, 3,000, maybe 10,000 Pokémon.” Which is, to put it gently, a lot of pocket monsters.
The comments were made in a group interview attended by GamesRadar+, where Hoshino explained that Pokémon Champions is being developed as an evolving competitive platform rather than a traditional single-player journey. The game is expected to support future Pokémon releases over time as the main series continues to expand.
Why not just let every Pokémon in at once?
That kind of future sounds exciting until someone has to balance it.
Hoshino said the team wants to include as many Pokémon as possible, but not necessarily all of them simultaneously. Instead, the plan is to rotate which Pokémon are available through different “blocks,” a system similar to the Regulation Sets already used in competitive Pokémon play.
The reasoning is straightforward enough. Even with a little over 1,000 Pokémon already in existence, competitive balance is a serious job. If the roster ever swelled into the thousands, allowing every species into every match would create what Hoshino called a “complicated situation.”
In other words, the game is being designed to scale, but not to collapse under the weight of its own ambition. A sensible enough idea, given that Pokémon has spent nearly 30 years getting to 1,000 species and currently sits at 1,025 in the National Dex.
A franchise that keeps growing, whether the numbers feel sensible or not
Across nine generations, the series has steadily added around 100 or more new Pokémon at a time. That makes the jump to 10,000 sound wildly unrealistic for the near future, which it very much is.
Still, the point of Hoshino’s comments was less about predicting an exact number and more about showing how open-ended the game’s future is meant to be. Pokémon Champions is being built with the expectation that it could continue alongside the franchise for years, possibly decades, with its roster changing as new games and new creatures arrive.
So while 10,000 Pokémon remains firmly in the realm of “sure, why not, apparently,” the message is clear: this is a game intended to keep going for as long as Pokémon itself does.
