Pokémon Pokopia Companion App Accused Of Stealing From Fansite

Pokémon Pokopia has been out for a little under two weeks, and prominent fansite Serebii has been racing to document every Pokémon, habitat, recipe, and secret in Game Freak and Omega Force’s life sim. But now that the site has completed the bulk of the work, copycats are scraping the information for their own use, including an app that Serebii webmaster Joe Merrick claims has been scraping the site’s information for profit after over 200 hours of work playing and documenting the game.

Merrick has posted on his X account about a mobile app called Pokopedia, which positions itself as a companion app where Pokopia players can look up information about monster habitats, specialities, and much more. While the app designers could have found all this information themselves, as Merrick points out, the app appears to be scraping information from Serebii’s guides, as it seems to reflect some of the same omissions the site had while Merrick was building its database. For instance, the app fails to indicate that Snivy and Larvesta possess the Litter speciality, which Serebii also initially omitted in error.

Pokopedia has been shared by some prominent Pokémon creators who either don’t seem to be aware of the accusations being made against the app developer or don’t care about Serebii’s claims. Merrick says that he has experienced this kind of theft before during other Pokémon game launches, but Pokopia’s virality has caused it to spread much more quickly than usual.

The app, which includes an option to make a one-time $8.99 purchase to remove ads, is made by developer Hugo Duarte, who also made a similar app for Stardew Valley. Duarte has removed any mention of Pokopedia on his X account, but we have reached out to him for comment on the situation and will update the story if we hear back.