Why Pokémon Doesn’t Care If Their Games Are Bad

How did Pokémon, the most successful media franchise in the world, go from making greatness, to making Scarlet and Violet? The creators know what’s happening. They know the games aren’t great. They just don’t care anymore. The Pokémon games are no longer the focus of the companies behind the brand.

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📃 Research Links
Revenue of selected media franchises worldwide as of August 2021
Pokémon Yellow sales
History of the Pokémon company
Miyamoto on Starfox
The 50 Biggest Video Game Franchises by Total Revenue
This 1957 drawing reveals the brilliant strategy behind Disney's lasting success - Business Insider
@Smallant short
Jeff Bezos on Pokémon

[GoingIndie]

What game do you think was the peak of Pokémon?

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[goalhornfanatic]

Pokemon is becoming the COD of Nintendo. Just releasing whatever they can annually despite bugs or other issues knowing full well they're in there but choosing not to fix or prevent them because they know it will sell well regardless.

[lucasLSD]

Gen V was the last hoorah, they actually tried, they want all out animating all the sprites, they forced you to interact with an entire new gen of 150 pkmn and had a villain that made sense.

[hyperdreamsurfer]

I agree with the overall sentiment, but something that annoys me with the whole conversation about new Pokemon games is "it's not what adults want" as if we want the games to have a darker, more philosophical plot(though we had that in 5th and 6th gen). If anything, I just want something simpler, with more polish, and some new content. The technology doesn't have to be incredible, it just has to be enough to give the illusion and sensation of having an adventure with cute little monsters. And not have a bunch of confusing, counterintuitive design decisions.

[JadeMythriil]

Combination of apathy and overworking. Pokemon keeps releasing games every year in order to maintain relevancy but the recent games have shown that there just isn't enough time to release these games on a yearly basis. And as games get bigger they keep rushing the games out in order to maintain a quota and i feel that's destroying the games.

[bigbossgaming]

Pokemon doesnt care if its games are bad because you keep buying them.

[Kulkogo]

I would like to say that the Pokémon games are lacking everything from the OG gens. I’ve played all the games in order, and it really shows

[PikaPower]

yes.... and no. It's not just marketing. It's a loss of passion. People forget that everyone criticized B/W after release, and praised X and Y. Black and White were supposed to be the epitome of the franchise and has been stated as being the most effort that Gamefreak ever put into a single title. But Gamefreak heard the fans loud and clear. Black and White is a 6/10 and X and Y is a 9. Why try hard when your fans will eat up the slop you make?

[gregomyeggo]

I just don’t see why games can’t have better stories and more challenging aspects and STILL be designed for younger players, the earlier gens sold great and had far more to offer.

[Zack-blgg]

RIP Situru Iwata, I feel like he would be disappointed by Nintendo's stagnant mobility the last few years.

[callmeshifu]

One thing: pokemon legends arceus was a fresh and innovative idea that was immediately beloved by most fans.

[hawkfeather]

I think the company can make good games again if they just spent more time on them. The reason the older games were better is because they had enough time to fully finish the story, design, everything. If they went back to having 3 years between new games I think they would be better.

[charvisaur]

Shout out to all the great pokemon fan games out there. Rejuvenation, Reborn, Insergence, and all the other adult themed pokemon games with revamped difficulty curves. We've reached a point where fan games legitimately outclass mainstream titles.

[aregularfan]

I grew up with gen 4 and 5, with my first game being Diamond and my favorite being white 2. I’ve played at least one game or more from every generation multiple times, and even despite the fact that the gameboy games are much older than the DS loves I loved all of them almost equally. Everything after gen 5 really just does not capture the same feeling those old games bring, especially since the switch era. It is very sad to see one of my favorite series of all time decline so much, and will probably never go past its peak from the 2D era.

[grahamnu]

Didn't address a big part of the issue. The last gen was the most sold ever. There is a core audience that will buy anything as long as is a new gen pkm game.

[ma_junia]

HGSS ruined Pokémon by virtue of being the greatest games in the franchise and no game has ever come close

[Handles_be_dumb]

Its so strange comparimg modern Digimon to modern Pokémon. Digimon now has more polish for their games, and that's insane

[chopper]

Wow you're absolutely right. I remember thinking that Pokemon on switch would be the turning point, I thought it was going to look like yokai watch 4 or better.

[Nyzer_]

One of the craziest things to me is that they're so fixated on this annual release shit AND keeping their team small... yet they've stopped the "remake with the same engine" plan, barely do any outsourcing, and continue trying to be way too ambitious compared to what they can actually do. Sword and Shield, PLA, and S/V all suffer from being too ambitious for their own good, and PLA especially gets shit on a lot for its graphics (which sucks, considering its gameplay is the most polished of the entire set, and I'll take a graphical hit any day over the fucking slog of menu loading that is S/V's UI).

Sword and Shield should not have released with a Wild Area. That should've been left for the DLC. And S/V should have followed up by just having fully 3D routes rather than being open world. PLA should have maybe taken another year to release so the graphics could be touched up and the game could look like S/V does.

BDSP gets shit on a lot, but if they'd just incorporated the Platinum features I honestly think it would have been nonoffensive at worst, even with the shenanigans of saving money on cartridges by making players download the music and movies. It's otherwise a quite faithful remake that could have been the template for how to handle remakes and ports by outsourcing them to different companies and releasing them during years that new games won't be coming out.

[night]

I disagree about kids not caring about end game content or a game being too easy. Pokemon was too easy when I was a kid, it was babies first RPG already, to dumb it even further down is stupid. If kids nowadays don't care about that stuff is because they aren't getting quality games so their standards are lower than mine when I was a kid.