Okay, another Pokémon Development Lesson incoming.

It is a fact that Pokémon as a franchise is the most profitable media franchise in the world.

Not even Disney can touch it.

This fact comes with some major misconceptions however.

The great majority of that revenue comes from merchandise and that too is what most of the money is put back into.

The games, despite selling upwards of 10 million units per version, are not the focal point of budget or revenue.

In fact, and this should be obvious if you just step back and look at the games, the Pokémon titles are developed on somewhat of a moderate budget.

Not small, of course, but comparatively smaller than other massive media franchises do.

This is by design. Game Freak is a company with around 90 employees, a sort-of average size for an independent Japanese development studio.

The budget they receive in funding is made to match the kind of games they make.

I've seen people say they should get more employees, a bigger budget and more development time.

But look, that's not something that benefits every production.

Again, Game Freak are an independent studio.

They want to remain independent and develop in-house for the series they helped create alongside Creatures Inc and Nintendo when founding The Pokémon Company.

But just because a game makes money doesn't mean the development approach must or should change.

Pokémon as a series have always been more comparable to titles like Harvest Moon or the Atelier series than Call of Duty or GTA in terms of production values.

That's by design.

You don't have to like that, but that just means you don't like the kind of games Game Freak makes, not that it's inherently bad for them to not want to change their approach.

Yes, The Pokémon Company could afford to pour a massive amount of money into a Pokémon game that's built to match "mainstream AAA standards" with extreme scopes and all.

But that would mean betraying the developers of the game in the first place.

Sure, they can outsource to more studios, they can make development time longer, they can go all out on it.

But ...why?

Why is that something Pokémon should do?

I've seen some people say that they wanted the first Switch Pokémon game to be as big in scope as Breath of the Wild was.

And like... Why?

I realize I'm not a fan of BotW but like ... not every series has to become a massive open world sandbox with realism as a focus.

Pokémon shouldn't have to be Breath of the Wild or Red Dead Redemption 2 or Death Stranding or whatever else "standards" people think all major games should be held to.

It's a classic turn-based RPG about collecting monsters primarily enjoyed by kids. It's fine.

Just like Harvest Moon, or Story of Seasons as it's called now, doesn't have to become a realistic farming simulator. It's fine that it's a more modest game in terms of production value.

That's what the series was beloved as, changing it just because it makes money is absurd.

Hell, I'd argue that if they were to make Pokémon into a massive budget "AAA" style game then it might turn off far more people to the point that it might not make back its own budget for the first time.

You know, like all the other AAA games chasing after CoD numbers.

I for one don't want to see the inevitable headline of "Pokémon failed to meet sales expectations" just because it tried to be more like other massive franchises.

You look at games like Anthem, which spent 7 years in production, released and didn't make a profit despite selling huge numbers and has now died out and like...

...why should Game Freak chase that market?

I think it's far better that they stick to their more modest games.

I do hope that they get more time to work on games moving forward, the Switch launch was kind of awkward for them I reckon, but I don't think "more money" is a solution.

And while morale is low at Game Freak after all the negativity, at least we don't hear reports of massive layoffs after every Pokémon game.

That's, y'know, very good.

"If they don't want AAA standards then the games shouldn't have AAA prices."

They don't.

If they did there'd be a 60 dollar season pass, launch day paid DLC and microtransactions to unlock the exp candy and getting balls.

And the games I referred to that share production value standards with Pokémon are also full price retail games so...

Yeah, uh, it's not just the big AAA games that cost 60 bucks.

Seriously, do the people whining even play games?