Nintendo's new competitive battler launched to frustration over low Pokemon counts, clunky menus, and poor performance.
Nintendo's new free-to-start competitive battler Pokemon Champions landed on Switch and Switch 2 on April 8, and it hasn't had the smoothest of starts. The game takes the franchise in a genuinely new direction — a global tournament circuit built around competitive team-building and head-to-head battles, rather than the open-world catching and exploration that defined Scarlet and Violet. On paper, it's a smart pivot. The Pokemon competitive scene has millions of dedicated players who have long wanted a dedicated, first-party platform for high-level play. Pokemon Champions could have been exactly that. Instead, the launch has been a mess.
The most immediate complaint from players is the roster size. Pokemon Champions launched with what critics and players agree is a disappointingly small selection of Pokemon available for competitive use. The Pokemon Company has historically staggered competitive rosters in titles like Pokemon Unite, but Champions' starting pool feels especially thin relative to how many years of creatures the franchise has to draw from. Veterans of the competitive scene found themselves locked out of their preferred teams entirely.
Performance has been the other major flashpoint. Switch 2 was supposed to be the platform that finally gave Pokemon breathing room after years of rough technical showings on Switch. Even on the newer hardware, Pokemon Champions is reportedly dropping frames during matches and exhibiting input lag that competitive players — where frame-perfect timing can determine outcomes — find unacceptable. These aren't minor gripes. For a game whose entire identity is built on competitive integrity, poor performance is a fundamental problem.
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Prominent leaker Centro Leaks called the launch "terrible," and the criticism spread fast enough that the development team issued a public apology acknowledging the performance issues specifically. The apology committed to an upcoming patch addressing the most pressing complaints and promised a roadmap for additional Pokemon and ranked features. It's the right response, but the damage to first impressions is already done.
The comparison to Pokemon Unite is unavoidable. That game also launched with a limited roster and a learning curve that frustrated early players, but it found a large, loyal audience over time. Pokemon Champions has better bones than Unite did at launch — the tournament format is genuinely compelling, and the team-building depth is exactly what hardcore fans have been asking for — but it also launched into higher expectations. Switch 2 was supposed to signal a new era of Nintendo software quality.
The Among Us comparison is worth making too. That game spent years as a minor release before a single viral moment turned it into a cultural phenomenon. Pokemon Champions has the franchise power to sustain a slow burn in a way that Among Us could never have predicted for itself. The Pokemon brand alone guarantees an audience. The question is whether that audience stays patient while the developers patch the game into the product it should have been at launch.
Keep an eye on the patch notes over the coming weeks. If the performance fixes arrive quickly and the roster expands meaningfully before the first competitive season begins, Champions has a real shot at becoming what the competitive Pokemon community has always wanted. If the updates are slow and the roster stays thin, the game risks becoming another footnote in Nintendo's long list of squandered competitive opportunities.
