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The Pokémon Unite MOBA game is disappointing Nintendo fans in both China and the US
- The upcoming mobile and Nintendo Switch game from Tencent and The Pokémon Company is attracting a lot of negative comments, but some say they’ll play it anyway
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A new mobile Pokémon game is coming from Tencent, but Chinese gamers don’t seem very excited about it. That’s in spite of the fact that the game is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game, a popular genre in China.
“Can a domestic game only be a MOBA and just re-skin [an existing game] to make money?” asked one person on the microblogging site Weibo, including a row of puke emojis and a Pokémon Unite hashtag.
Tencent announced the upcoming Pokémon Unite on Wednesday, saying the game would be released both on mobile devices and the Nintendo Switch. But unlike the original role-playing games, this new one from Tencent’s Timi Studios turns Pokémon into a five-on-five team battle game. Timi Studios is best known as the developer of the MOBA game Honour of Kings, designed to be a mobile version of League of Legends and also China’s biggest mobile game. The studio recently scored another hit with Call of Duty: Mobile, which has racked up 250 million downloads in nine months.
But even when getting to tap into the fanbase of an established hit franchise like Pokémon, Timi Studios appears to be sticking to what it knows. Pokémon Unite looks much like any other MOBA, pitting two teams of five characters against each other in a closed map. The goal is for a team to try to be the first to demolish the enemy’s base. In this case, players are choosing five Pokémon to defend their territory.
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