Nintendo has announced the End of Service for Pokémon Bank. Pokémon Bank will end on Thursday, February 25, 2027.
Don’t worry, we’re not talking about Pokémon Home — that’s a separate application and still very much alive, and the primary way Pokémon players transfer their ‘mons between different platforms and games, including Pokémon GO, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, and Pokémon Champions.
Pokémon Bank was created during the Nintendo 3DS era of Pokémon games (circa 2013). It was downloadable from the Nintendo eShop, and allows players to store thousands of Pokémon. For the first time, players could streamline the process of transferring a Pokémon from one game to another, and even across generations, via the PokéTransporter app.
Nintendo closed the 3DS eShop in 2023, though users who already had Pokémon Bank could continue to use it. Up until February 2027!
Pokémon Home is the modern successor to Bank. It was released in 2020 as a free-to-download subscription app on the eShop for Switch, as well as mobile platforms. Pokémon can be moved from Bank to Home, but not vice-versa.
Bank shutting down makes it much harder to legally transfer Pokémon from older gen games (including as far back as the GBA era) into modern ones, though Nintendo pumps out remakes of the old generations often enough.
The next major Pokémon release, Pokémon Winds and Waves, are also due out in February 2027.
