Pokémon Legends Z-A sells 5.8mil in one week

[Zippy6]

Phenomajp13 said:

Zippy6 said:

Don't make nonsense accusations. Pokemon has historically been one of my favourite game series I have no desire for it to disappear. I want them to return to proper form and actually evolve with the times. If calling the biggest media franchise in the world out for having low budget, technically poor and antiquated titles is a hate-driven bandwagon then so be it. Frankly I think they should be doing better than being completely technically outclassed by almost every other developer of Switch exclusive titles when they're one of the biggest franchises in the world.

Even diehard Nintendo fans on this site call gamefreak out on their bullshit. That I think they should be far more ambitious with titles that will gross over a billion dollars is not some unreasonable demand. Most other developers put far more effort into their far smaller titles. Monolith craps all over them with what should be a tiny fraction of the resources that the developer of a pokemon game should have.

The issue with this logic is that it's only one way to look at things. Monolith makes excellent games just like the Zelda team but Pokemon's consistency is largely ignored to praise developers that release games every blue moon. It's nice that many consumers prefer them to slow down the cadence of releases in order to improve "quality" which is subjective but you don't get to speak for the entire userbase. Millions of consumers want content as soon as possible and if sacrificing prettier graphics or whatever helps them deliver more content then so be it, that's something Monolith and the Zelda team fail to deliver, consistent software. Pokemon has sold millions of more games than those franchises because of the consistency similar to Call of Duty. Call of Duty was able to catch and outsell Grand Theft Auto because GTA games take forever while CoD delivers content consistently like Pokemon.

The thing is, with the amount of money Pokemon brings in they should be able to provide quality on a consistent basis. They have enough money to have multiple large teams all working on different projects. 3 decently sized teams, with a 6 year dev time would be a game every 2 years, or even 2 teams with a 4 year gap between releases would probably see an improvement.

But for some reason we are in a situation where Game Freak works on a shoe string budget with little resources working to push out a game basically bi-annually. 

The resources game freak had back when they were making Pokemon for the DS/3DS and prior was enough. But on a modern HD system they clearly don't have enough to be delivering at the same pace (but they still try to keep that schedule anyway). As Miyamoto said, developing for the WiiU required twice as much resources as developing for the Wii. Now imagine how much more resources developing for the Switch compared to the 3DS needs. Why they are still a relatively smaller team working with so little money on the biggest media franchise in the world is just crazy.

Of all the IP Nintendo has, Pokemon shouldn't be the one that's not delivering the high quality they are known for.

Last edited by Zippy6 - on 24 October 2025