Pokopedia App Accused of Scraping 200-Plus Hours of Serebii Content

Joe Merrick had put more than 200 hours into documenting every Pokémon, habitat, recipe, and secret in Pokémon Pokopia for Serebii when he noticed something familiar: a third-party mobile app called Pokopedia appeared to be presenting his work, including his mistakes, as its own.

Merrick, who runs the long-running Pokémon fansite Serebii, posted on X on March 16 calling out Pokopedia directly. "With 200 hours work behind me on it, seeing my work just lifted and, in the case of the app, being used to make money...it hurts," he wrote. Pokopia, the Game Freak and Omega Force life sim, had only been out for a little under two weeks at the time, and Serebii had raced to build out its database during that window.

The detail that makes the scraping allegation hard to dismiss is a specific shared error. Serebii initially omitted the Litter speciality for Snivy and Larvesta while Merrick was still building the database. Pokopedia showed the same omission. That kind of matching gap is difficult to explain through independent data collection. Merrick also claims images from Serebii appeared in the app.

Pokopedia is not a free fan resource. The app carries ads and offers a one-time $8.99 purchase to remove them. It was built by developer Hugo Duarte, who previously released a similar companion app for Stardew Valley.

Duarte responded with a statement to Kotaku acknowledging they had used outside sources. After working on the app ahead of Pokopia's launch, Duarte said the volume of information released at launch led them to start "using other publicly available community sources such as Serebii to fill in the gaps." Duarte said they are "working on adding proper source attribution within the app" and expressed "a lot of respect for both Serebii and Merrick's work."

At the same time, Duarte removed all mention of Pokopedia from their X account and characterized the community response as something that had "gone well beyond fair criticism," accusing fans of Pokopia and Serebii of "coordinated harassment" that forced them to step back. No formal legal action, DMCA takedown, or app store removal has been reported as of this writing.

The situation sits in uncomfortable territory that fan content creators know well. Serebii's documentation is volunteer-driven labor, assembled through hundreds of hours of firsthand play, and it has powered Pokémon research for decades. Pokopedia charging users $8.99 to access what appears to be that same data, without attribution, is the part that stings. Duarte's admission that they used Serebii as a source, combined with the matching Snivy and Larvesta error, leaves the "independent research" defense looking thin.