This article was originally written for TheNintendoVillage.com, a website I founded and ran from 2018 to 2021.

We may have all been hoping for a Nintendo Direct to kick off 2020, and now we’ve got one - albeit not quite the one we may have been expecting.

Nintendo have announced a dedicated Pokémon Direct for 9 January, packed full of new Pokémon info according to Nintendo’s press release. The Direct will air at 6:30am Pacific Time / 9:30am Eastern / 2:30pm UK Time.

As for what we can expect to see, the Pokémon Global Link service is shutting down as of 20 February, presumably to make way for Pokémon Home. Whilst we’ve got some basic details about that new service already, we may well get a more detailed look at what’s included.

The German announcement for the Direct also reportedly states that more details about Sword and Shield will be discussed. That could just be the Pokémon Home integration of course, but we may learn about some updates or in-game events too! With Pokémon Sword and Shield only dropping a couple of months ago we’d be surprised if there any new game reveals, although you never know - we could get a spin-off of some description (Pokémon Snap 2 please!)

You can check back here on Thursday to watch the stream, which we’ve embedded below.

What are you hoping to see? Let us know down in the comments!

Source: Nintendo PR