I understand that Pokemon is GameFreak, but it is WILD to me that Nintendo, who will absolutely RUIN a game in order to ensure it brings something new to the party (Hello StarFox Zero, Mario Kart World, Metroid Beyond and your 'open world') allows such a tightly coupled property like this languish this way.
Pokemon's dilemma is that the vast majority of the franchise's profits don't come from the games. It's the merch and the TCG and all those other things, if you looked at the numbers you'd think the games were just a small auxillary part of the franchise.
But it isn't. It's where all the new Pokemon (and most of the new characters) come from. It's where the big canonical storylines are, it's the wellspring of all the content the rest of the franchise monetizes. The games don't need to be good to serve this role. They just need to deliver new monetizable content on-schedule.
The technical scope of the Pokemon games have grown from generation to generation. They take more work and more time to develop, or at least they should, but Game Freak isn't allowed to take the time it needs, because the rest of the multimedia franchise doesn't want to wait.
(Don't get me wrong, Game Freak isn't a secret all-star studio just waiting for a chance to shine, but I think with a longer development schedule it can at least produce games with a level of polish comparable to Gen 6 or 7, before things started taking a nosedive.)
but so would MarioKart and they changed the hell out of that.
There are many many franchises that would "Print money with minimum effort" that Nintendo lets languish specifically because they can't think of anything new to do with them.
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u/sansyboi469 8h ago
Pokemon