Poll of the Day > Game Freak is "having conversations about Pokemon's release schedule"

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.thegamer.com/pokemon-company-having-conversations-release-schedule-scarlet-violet/

"I think in general, if you look at the past, the path we've taken up until now has been this constant release, always regularly releasing products on a fairly fixed kind of a cadence, you might say," said Utsunomiya via his translator. "Always having these products able to be introduced and new experiences for our customers, and that's how we've operated up until now."
"I think we're still operating in that way, but there's more and more conversations, as the development environments change, about how we can continue to do this, while making sure that we're ensuring really quality products are also being introduced."

So they're aware that Pokemon's reputation is being harmed by the fact that they're pumping out big, buggy, ugly releases every year, but they're still not ready to commit to making changes because they like making money.

Don't buy the DLC, don't buy the next game, make them work for your dollar. I've been a Pokemon fan since I got my hands on Japanese Pokemon cards in 1997, and I'm sick of Game Freak and TPC being unable to deliver a quality product. Don't buy Pokemon until they're willing to put effort into it.

its literally the highest grossing media franchise in human history. a post on potd teling people to not buy their games accomplishes nothing lmao

I'm just spreading it whereever I can. I tell people on reddit don't buy Pokemon, and get downvoted. Because apparently buying it is easier than not buying it for Pokemon fans, despite the fact everyone knows it's bad.

Way too late for this. I saw a video talking about this. Didn't even bother watching it. They already lost me as a fan when they sunset the 25 year long anime and have basically abandoned everything that made Pokemon for me with Legends Arceus and S&V. BDSP was sadly the last Pokemon game I will ever buy and it's incredibly soulless.

I couldn't watch the last Pokemon Presents for more than 5 minutes. They are simply targeting a different audience now (or maybe it was always that audience and I was ignorant to it) and that audience is the same "super fan" audience that everyone else is targeting. It's no longer the 90s, or 00s. or even 10s. Marketing targets the whales and the hyper consumers now and the normal people get left out.

For those who don't know - a "fan" is not simply someone who is a fan of something anymore. A "fan" is someone who is willing to pay out the pocket to go to events, interact with the community, create content and try and make a living off of your product. Fans share your brand on social media and do your marketing for free. Fans do not negatively comment on a brand. I doubt many of us here would be considered fans by companies despite many of us loving Pokemon since the brand began.

havent been buying their products since about S/M, the release schedule (plus gamefreak keeping a small staff for how fucking successful they are) absolutely guts the franchise. they are gradually losing their fans' support and i'm glad they at least realize that. hope they actually fix the issue

Judgmenl posted...

They already lost me as a fan when they sunset the 25 year long anime

I've heard the original run's conclusion was pretty fucking hype and the current season of the new one is very well received, so I can't hold the anime decision against em. Tbh Ash lasted entirely too long

agesboy posted...

I've heard the original run's conclusion was pretty fucking hype and the current season of the new one is very well received, so I can't hold the anime decision against em. Tbh Ash lasted entirely too long

Aim to Be a Pokemon Master was excellent but it showed that they could have made a good anime and that there was so much wasted potential over the past few years. Pokemon is not about the anime or games anymore. It's about the events, the Netflix tie ins, the media crossovers (usually only Japan only, think Acadia by Bump of Chicken for SwSh), and the merchandise. Remember that the Japanese Pokemon Youtube channel has ****ing ASMR on it.

crazy that they havent made a good Pokmon game in 11 years

Judgmenl posted...

Pokemon is not about the anime or games anymore.

well yea, it's the highest grossing multimedia franchise of all time. the games are just a foundation

It's good they recognized the problem.

It makes sense that they ran up against this problem. They took a schedule that worked for developing 2D handheld games and tried to use it to develop 3D handheld and later console games with very few changes. That's obviously going to create some issues, and it's good that they're at least aware that those issues have the potential to hurt the brand. S/V did well, but a huge part of that was how appealing "Pokemon, but open-world!" was, which got people to try it out despite the embarrassingly bad technical performance. That isn't necessarily going to work moving forward, now that people have had their fill of open-world Pokemon and are going to need something new to look past similar issues in future games, and that's going to create a need to avoid those issues to keep sales up.

I really liked scarlet actually

I didn't play it, but I bought Violet for my girlfriend for Christmas, and she really enjoyed it. She just had a good time exploring the world and finding Pokemon, which the game is actually really good for. She certainly had issues (mostly, how trying to shorehorn in the story progression of previous games interfered with the fact that she just wanted to run around and catch Pokemon), but for the most part the technical and performance issues are just stupid, rather than anything that seriously hurts gameplay. They're still inexcusably bad, of course, especially when you've got Xenoblade 3 and TotK releasing on the same system and delivering large environments that both looked and performed orders of magnitude better (so it's not like the Switch couldn't handle Pokemon, though to be fair, Monolith are wizards of optimization), but that doesn't mean the core game isn't fun.