Pokémon Company cosies up to Diamond and Pearl remake developer via new subsidiary

The Pokémon Company has established a new subsidiary, Pokémon Works, based on the same building as ILCA, the studio which developed Pokémon Home and the recent Diamond and Pearl remakes.

Pokémon Works is yet to get a formal announcement, but its trademark and company registration was spotted this week by the eagle-eyed Serebii.net.

ILCA previously worked as a support studio on Square Enix's Dragon Quest 11: Echoes of an Elusive Age, and is currently working on the upcoming Sand Land video game, based on Akira Toriyama's manga.

But their most famous work to date has arguably been 2021's Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Pokémon Shining Pearl, which helped fill that year's usual November slot before the launch of Pokémon Legends Arceus in early 2022.

Fans had suspected a further set of Pokémon remakes would follow – perhaps based around DS games Pokémon Black and White. But last month we learned that the next major Pokémon game on the way would instead be a new Legends follow-up, Pokémon Legends: ZA.

What ILCA – and more specifically, Pokémon Works – are working on next remains unknown. We've asked The Pokémon Company for more.

Regardless, more teams working on the franchise's games is hopefully a good thing. Fans and critics have highlighted issues, including bugs and poor technical performance, found in several recent Pokémon titles. The Pokémon Company has acknowledged the problems and apologized.

“We are aware that players may encounter issues that affect the games' performance,” Nintendo said shortly after the launch of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet – the fourth and fifth major Pokémon games to launch in the space of just 12 months. “Our goal is always to give players a positive experience with our games, and we apologize for the inconvenience. We take the feedback from players seriously and are working on improvements to the games.”