Each of the games featured at the Pokemon World Championship Series has its own separate stream on Twitch and YouTube. During the event (and after, if you watch the VODs), the Official Pokemon YouTube and Twitch channels have Day 1 and Day 2 streams for Go, TCG, and VGꦑC, culminating in a Championship Sunday stream where the final rounds of all three games are streamed back to back on a shared feed. As you might imagine, the championship stream is the most popular, pulling in over 450k views on YouTube alone.
The missing game, Pokemon Unite, actually has an entirely seperate channel. Unlike Go, TCG, and VGC, the Unite Championship is only a two day event, ending with the grand finals on Saturday night. There were two separate streams foღr each day of the tournament this year, one for each stage Unite matches were played on, with the finals pulling in 527k views on YouTube - 77k more than all the other Pokemon games combined. This was only Unite’s second year at Worlds, but by some measures it’s already become the most popular game of the entire event.
Having been at Worlds this year, it’s no wonder why. Unite is a fast-paced, action-oriented game that offers a kind of spectator experience that the other Pokemon games - despite their legacies and popularity among players - can’t compete with. There’s plenty of excitement and dramatic moments in the main Pokemon games too, but when you watch Unite live it's obvious that it was designed to be just as enjoyable to watch as it is to play. MOBAs naturally make great spectator experiences, and even though Unite is quite different from League of Legends and Dota, it has the same qualities that make those games so exciting to watch. The short matches, explosive team fights, and ever-present possibility of big swing comebacks are all part of what makes Unite a great spectator experience, and its popularity at Pokemon Worlds is a bigger deal than you might think.
It’s fascinating just how different Unite is from all the other games at Worlds. All of the Pokemon games are single-player head-to-head matches, while Unite is Pokemon’s only team game. This means that there’s a much smaller pool🌺 of players competing. More than 700 players were invited to Worlds to play in multiple divisions across Go, TCG, and VGC, but just 28 teams competed for Unite World Champion, which is only 140 players total.
Instead of havওing a huge crowd of players like the other games, Unite instead has a huge crowd of spectators. Not only does it share one-quarter of the main stage with the other three games, but it also has a nearby B stage where several hundred people can watch commentary-less matches. Next to the B stage is yet anoth😼er spectator area where even more games that weren’t being streamed during the group stage of the tournament could be viewed. No other game at Worlds had this much space dedicated solely to watching games be played.
You also don’t have to be a competitive Unite player to app🍨reciate watching competitive Unite. The TCG and VGC can be difficult to follow if you’re not en🙈grossed in the meta, you don’t know the specific cards being played, and you’re not aware of the intricacies of individual Pokemon abilities and team comps. But Unite delivers actions that’s easy to follow even if you don’t know how every Pokemon’s moves work. You can enjoy watching Unite even if you don’t speak the same language as the commentators too. It’s fun to watch teams battle over Rayquaza, even without context.
The audience for Unite built throughout the first day of the tournament, and once attendees got used to the schedule, you could see the entire crowd shifting back and forth between the main stage and the B stage to catch as many matches as possible. At one point both stages were in between matches at the same tಌime, so hundreds of people grouped around several 32-inch TVs to cont𒁃inue watching off-stream matches play out. Saturday night, when all the other games had finished for the day and the entire main stage was solely dedicated to the Unite finals, every player and spectator in attendance turned their attention to Pokemon Unite. It was a sight to behold, and it proved that Unite has an important place at Worlds.
There’s a lot of reasons why Unite is important to the competitive Pokemon scene. Not only is it the only team-based game, but as a free-to-play mobile and Switch game, it’s also the most accessible. Playing the video game competitively requires an unbelievable time commitment and a long history of the series, the TCG is expensive to keep up with, and Go has a laundry list of accessibility issues, but all you need is a phone and the skills to be competitive in Unite. You don’t have to breed and train the perfect Pokemon, there’s no expansions or DLC to keep up with, and you don’t have to walk miles or live in a major city to stay competitive. Anyone who watched the Unite finals and got hyped for the game could start playing on the ranked ladder with the exact same Pokemon that same night. You can&rs💧quo;t say that about any of the other Pokemon games.
Unite has grown tremendously over the last year. Twice as many teams competed at Worlds this year than last, and the road to get there involved competing in a long series of in-person events across the globe - no🔯ne of which existed in the previous competitive season. Next year will likely be even bigger, with more teams competing in more regional events as the game continues to grow and draw in interests from both new players and esports organizations. Perhaps most importantly, Unite is increasing viewership for Worlds by offering a more viewer-friendly experience. This is the game Worlds has been missing, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if it one day overtook the other three in popularity and became the main attraction for Pokemon Worlds. For many, it already is.