Pokemon Nintendo Direct Is Live

Nintendo has announced a Pokemon-focused Direct presentation for this week. The broadcast will air on Thursday, January 9, at 6:30 AM PT / 9:30 AM ET and will cover "roughly 20 minutes of new Pokemon information." [Update: The stream is underway--you can watch it below for all the news and announcements, which so far have included a Switch version of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Rescue Team DX and an expansion pass for Pokemon Sword and Shield.]

Nintendo will stream the Pokemon Direct on its website, YouTube, and Twitch channels. As for what will be discussed during the broadcast, the official Pokemon Twitter account teases there will be "some exciting updates coming to the world of Pokemon this year."

Now that Pokemon Sword and Shield are out, it's hard to predict just what this week's Direct will cover. We already know that Pokemon Home, a new Pokemon Bank-like cloud service for Nintendo Switch and smartphones, is slated to launch sometime in "early 2020," so we may finally get more details on that during the presentation.

We also know there's a new Detective Pikachu game for Switch on the way. The Pokemon Company announced the title last June during a press conference ahead of E3, although it shared no other details about it at the time. There's also the mysterious Pokemon Sleep, a new app that will launch this year and "turn sleep into entertainment."

As for Pokemon Sword and Shield, the games' current batch of Max Raid events ends on January 9, which means it'll be much harder to find Gigantamax Snorlax, Butterfree, and a few other Pokemon after that date. Time is also running out to claim some of the games' freebies, including Gigantamax Meowth, which will only be available until January 15. You can see all the freebies available in Sword and Shield right now and how to get them in our roundup.