Pokémon Sleep makes real bedtime the gameplay — 10M downloads in five weeks

After Pokémon GO proved that walking could be a game, The Pokémon Company asked what else people do every day without noticing. At a press conference in May 2019, president Tsunekazu Ishihara unveiled Pokémon Sleep: an app that tracks the player's real sleep and turns it into gameplay. 'Everyone spends a large part of their lives sleeping,' he said, 'and turning that into entertainment is our next challenge.' Tokyo-based studio Select Button, known for Magikarp Jump, was chosen to build it.

The mechanics inverted normal gaming: instead of playing to progress, players put their phone by the pillow and simply sleep. The app measured sleep duration and consistency and sorted the night into styles such as dozing, snoozing and slumbering. When players woke, Pokémon that slept in similar ways had gathered around a Snorlax, and each morning offered new sleep styles to research toward a Sleep Style Dex — a collecting goal that rewarded regular bedtimes rather than long sessions.

A companion device, the Pokémon Go Plus+ (a $55 pokéball that also works with Pokémon GO), let players track sleep without keeping the phone on the mattress; it could sing lullabies and act as an alarm. The game was announced in 2019 but delayed for four years, finally rolling out worldwide from 17 July 2023. It became the most-downloaded game in its launch week according to data.ai and passed 10 million downloads by 25 August 2023, an unusually fast start for a game with almost no active gameplay.