There’s a new Pokémon game being made by China’s Tencent

Guess who’s making a Pokémon game? Tencent’s Timi Studio. The studio behind Arena of Valor and Call of Duty Mobile has just signed a contract with The Pokémon Company to co-develop a new game.

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No further details have been released, so we still don’t know what the game is or when it’ll be released, but it’s an exciting development for the huge Pokémon franchise to finally make a splash in China.

It’s clear that The Pokémon Company has been eyeing up China for a while now, with varying degrees of success. 2016’s Pokémon Sun and Moon were released in Chinese at the same time as the English and Japanese versions. But on the flipside, global sensation Pokémon Go is still not available in China. 

But the thirst for Pokémon in China is clear. Recently, a knock-off game called Let’s Go Pokémon Mobile went viral due to how polished it looked. 

And NetEase recently said that it’s bringing free-to-play title Pokémon Quest to the country. Which makes it all the more surprising that The Pokémon Company’s partner on this brand new game is NetEase’s biggest rival, Tencent.

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So what do we know about the co-developer of the game, Timi Studio?

Owned by Tencent, Timi is the developer behind China’s most popular game, Honor of Kings, known as Arena of Valor in the West. In China, the game raked in a mind-boggling US$2 billion in revenue last year, according to Sensor Tower.

Timi is also making Call of Duty Mobile for Activision Blizzard, which is slated for release later this year. Timi’s other products include Contra: Return, Crossfire: Legends and QQ Speed Drifters -- spanning many different genres, with a mix of original titles and licensed games.

But there is one thing we might be able to glean from the company's history. While neither The Pokémon Company nor Tencent has said which platform the new game will appear on, Timi specializes in making mobile games. Most of the company’s products are mobile games, and China has hundreds of millions of mobile gamers.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it will only be on mobile. Timi’s Arena of Valor is also available on the Nintendo Switch. And Tencent would likely love to have the game on Switch, as the company recently announced that it’s bringing the console to China.