Pokémon’s 24-hour live stream was a delightful change of pace

The world was seemingly on fire for Fornite players during the recent blackout stream. But let’s not forget that Pokémon did the excessively long reveal stream first.

In the run-up the highly anticipated Pokémon Sword and Shield, the Pokémon company has been in full hyperdrive with the reveals. A few weeks ago, we got the reveal of Sirfetch’d the Sword exclusive Pokémon giving the fans what they’d been wanting for years, an evolution to everyone’s favourite leak wielding duck. Naturally, this led to fans waiting with bated breath about the Shield exclusive.

However, instead of another reveal video, we were gifted/cursed with the 24-hour Pokémon nature live stream. Likely a parody of wildlife streams often undertaken by zoos and seen in nature documentaries. Sure enough, like most wildlife streams, for the majority of the stream, there was little to nothing to see. In the end, it wound up being a long-winded reveal of the upcoming games’ new form of Ponyta. This was confirmed days later with an actual reveal video on the Pokémon company’s various social medias.

The staggering amount of people watching clocked in at 20,500 viewers on streaming platform Twitch when I popped into the stream myself. People in chat kept themselves amused, mostly trolling each other with continual messages of “WOAH DID YOU SEE THAT” when nothing had happened.

So why do this? What was the Pokémon Company’s aim with this stunt? Well it’s simple, it’s fun. The Pokémon world is a world full of Pokémon professors studying the wonderous creatures to learn more. Much like the real world, these professors set up cameras to study the Pokémon. No doubt only the most die-hard fan of the franchise would actually view the entire 24 hours, but for the rest of us it was a fun little distraction to pop into for a few minutes to see if we’d glimpse anything of interest.

Many complained the stream was pointless and a waste of time. But was it really? It was an attempt at world-building that tries to expand the universe of Pokémon just that little bit more. The many social media platforms were a buzz of people throwing around ideas and theories about glimpses of this new Pokémon. While fun the aim of this stream was likely to get people talking, and you can’t argue it hasn’t. It might not be the big reveal everyone was hoping for or a stream of multiple new Pokémon but you at least have to give some credit to them for trying something new. But more importantly, why have they still not released the evolutions for the starters yet? I’m waiting. Your move GameFreak.