The service, which allows online Pokemon storage and transfer of your old Gen V Pokemon to X and Y, will cost $5 a year.
If you were planning on bringing all of your old friends from Pokemon Black and White and Black and White 2 with you on your Pokemon X and Y journey, I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait a few months. Nintendo has revealed that Pokemon Bank, an online Pokemon storage system, and Poke Transporter, the service that will allow transfer of Gen V Pokemon to Gen VI, won’t launch until December 27, over two months after the game’s October 12 release date.
Access to the Pokemon Bank service will come with a yearly fee of $5, but the first month will be free, if you download and use the app by January 31, 2014. Pokemon Bank will give you access to 100 storage boxes of your own, enabling you to store up to 3,000 Pokemon.
The Poke Transporter is actually a separate app to the Pokemon Bank that only works with the Gen V games, but still requires the Pokemon Bank subscription to use. You’ll be able to download it for free once you subscribe to Pokemon Bank. Note that once you’ve Poke Transferred a Pokemon from your Gen V game to your Pokemon Bank, you won’t be able to move him back.
Nintendo stresses that the Pokemon Bank is a “long term” service, and will be compatible with all future Pokemon games.
I’m pretty big into Pokemon, but I still honestly can’t see a need to have all of that extra online storage, and will most likely just use the one-month free trial to move all my Gen V guys across. What do you guys think?
Source: Siliconera