| IcaroRibeiro said: While I agree with your perception about Pokemons games framework, I think you're exageritng a bit the mission/goal behind pokemon games The focus and vision about Pokemon is to sell toys and merchandise and it's arguably a more successful interprise than selling video games. That's why Pokemon has a separate company to deal with marketing and products. Pokemon already reached the wider market way back in the 90s with anime and movies, everybody knows Pokemon and Pokemon merchan is a easy gift even for people who doesn't care at all for either gaming or animes. The games weren't doing any better either. They were doing about the same from the third to seventh generation, with Switch generation been the outlier because of the Switch software boom coming from people who haven't owned Nintendo handheld consoles, but this success was given to more core gamers than supposed wider audiences Wider audiences though are more present in other Games, like Pokemon Go and Pokemon Unite. We can see Pokemon company is succeeding bringing in casuals to platforms they don't need to pay for. The reason why they keep releasing generational games is to release more Pokemons (i.e. more merchan to sell) and use this new generation to keep releasing new anime, movies and having source material to keep upgrading the host of their side games In this sense, they can drastically change the gameplay of a mainline game and sales are very likely to not suffer much, and even if they suffer most of their source of money (merchan) will be kept intact for as long the brand still fresh and light, and Pokemon Company is pretty good are keeping Pokemon brand clean and soft. So I'd say the reason why they never tried to changed much their formula is precisely because gaming is already secondary for them. They have the same devs from the 90s working in their host, they have no reason to pass trough the hassle and challenge of changing much when their framework keep providing content to release their animes, cards and movies. I will be even more blunt and say if it wasn't by Nintendo sharing the IP I could see Game Freak changing their approach to focus only on mobile games and forgetting their mainline efforts completely, but alas it's a shared IP so it won't happen. |
I agree on most things but the sales part because the games declined in sales during the GBA era but then halted the decline began increasing from the DS era the Switch software is not an outlier it's a continuation the decline was mostly due to Pokemon's wider focus outside the games when they decided to put more focus into the games again the sales started climbing back up and were even that far from 20m. The reason for the dedication to the formula is because it universally has appealed to the target audience, the younger generation, selling merchandise is a goal but the subculture fed by the games is a central important catalyst in the success of Pokemon's wider success.
