Pokémon Legends Z-A sells 5.8mil in one week

[Norion]

Slownenberg said:

Zippy6 said:

I'm not going to celebrate a game with a $13m budget lacking care, attention and polish selling so well lol. As has been the case for the past 8 years, a franchise like pokemon deserves much better. That you can put out a subpar product and sell it on brand strength is not something to be celebrated.

Pokemon selling so well while lacking any ambition is not something I can understand why anyone would be happy about.

But aside from that, the game should have very strong holiday sales. I don't expect legs to be particularly good going into future years but it can beat Arceus lifetime even with a weaker launch.

Z-A is a really sad moment for pokemon, nintendo, and gaming in general as I think this finally marks the complete downfall of the once celebrated Pokemon gaming franchise. This game seemed to be the final ultimate test by Game Freak to see if they can put in as little effort as humanly possible, and still sell normal pokemon numbers, and the answer is apparently yes. Which means we should probably never expect a good or even decent Pokemon game again because consumers have just validated their zero-effort approach.

You should wait till gen 10 next year before saying something like this cause with it being Switch 2 only, apparently being made on a new engine and getting a relatively long development cycle for a Pokemon game there is reason to have a bit of optimism for it. Though if that one doesn't notably push the series forward then yeah it'll be truly cooked so for me it's their last chance.

Last edited by Norion - on 24 October 2025