Alright, so I've happened to stumble across something that I find really interesting. Let's not waste any time because this might be a bit complicated. This all starts with what people might call their "perfect Pokémon game", and suffice to say... there's definitely not one consensus way to define what that may be. Surprisingly enough, though, there might actually be a way to unofficially define what the perfect Pokémon
generation might look like, or at the very least as close to perfect as we could feasibly reach. And with this in mind... how, in the world, have we gone through eight, going on nine full generations of core series Pokémon games at this point and The Pokémon Company and Game Freak still haven't figured this out?
Admittedly I want to use the word "perfect" very, very loosely to describe this situation, because the word "perfect" by default tends to be extremely opinionated. Consider from the eyes of a multimedia franchise's parent companies, though, what actually defines success. I'm sure we've all heard this before- the main overlying goal of a company is to make money, and that money in this industry is made by selling games. It makes sense, then, that these companies are going to want the core series Pokémon games to sell as well as possible. Crazy idea, I know. When I look at this, I start asking myself, "which kinds of games typically sell the best?" New games, remakes, third versions, et cetera.
This isn't a concrete list or anything, but I do think there's a bit of a hierarchy of success here: in every generation so far, the new games of the generation have sold the best, followed by remakes and Pokémon Legends games (provided the current sample size for the latter only consists of one game so far), followed by sequel games, of which we have three sets so far unless you count Legends: Arceus as a prequel, those being GSC (of Gen 1), HGSS (of FRLG), and B2W2 (of BW). The Indigo Disk could be seen as a sequel to The Teal Mask if you squint
really hard, but for the purpose of this list that doesn't count because they're a part of the same DLC package deal. Next we have third version games that are split into two versions, of which USUM is the only ones so far. Finally, on the bottom tier, we have singular third versions and DLC releases. DLC releases are a bit tricky to track, to be fair, since for all intents and purposes they're not adding to the sales of the base games by being purchased, and as such don't have easily watchable sales figures, at least as far as I could tell. If we ever do get published sales figures for DLC, they'll definitely not be locked into the bottom tier on the existing technicality. So. Are we all caught up? For those keeping track at home, here's what the sales tiers of each game category tend to look like from best to worst:
1. New games of each generation
2. Remakes and Legends games (for now, anyway- ZA isn't out yet)
3. Paired sequel games
(Edit: I got #2 and #3 flipped but the end result still ends up the same either way so we all good)
4. Paired third versions
5. Singular third versions and DLC (the latter on a technicality)
With the average sales per games (in millions) for each category ranked and this list constructed, we can revisit the question that started this post. What would be the "perfect Pokémon generation", and why haven't they made it yet? Once again we return to the incredibly loose definition of the word "perfect", but for the sake of what the entire point of running a company is, there is no set definition of perfect, only getting as close to it as you can. For any given Pokémon generation to do that, they would need to: A. contain as many games or pairs of games as possible, preferably without being too rushed, and B. have each of these games sell as well as possible. Every game in this hypothetical perfect generation would preferably need to be made for a highly successful console, too, in an effort to make full advantage of what is a game's "sell-through rate", referring to the percentage of game sales to console sales (for an example, Pokémon X & Y have a sell-through rate of 21.96% on the 3DS). The current record for longest a Pokémon generation has lasted is 48 months, and the current record for most games sold within a generation is four, since Gen 8 had DLC, the ILCA Sinnoh "remakes", and Legends: Arceus. As we can see on our list, though, DLC doesn't work as well as a base game plus a followup unless the base game sells well enough to warrant the decision (again, no watchable sales data). SO we either have to drop the DLC entirely or replace it with something higher up on the list.
After reviewing all of my data I have saved to a Google Sheets document, we're left with this roadmap of games for what would be as close to a "perfect generation" in terms of selling as many games as possible within the current parameters of the franchise:
- A new pair of base games
- A new pair of remakes (and a Legends game, but only if a third party makes at least one of these two)
- A new pair of sequel games for the base pair
That's literally it. That's all Game Freak has to do, and... have you ever noticed just how close we were to this? We've always been so close, it feels like, but every single time they're missing one tiny little detail. Gens 1 and 2 are out by default, unfortunately, since they only had two installments each
and a singular third version. Gens 3 and 4 are probably the closest we've ever gotten, but again, we had singular third versions which didn't sell as well as B2W2 or USUM. Not that Emerald or Platinum are bad games, of course. Gen 5 had the paired sequels but didn't have any remakes and was another "two installments in three years" generation as a result. Gen 6 also had only two installments in three years like Gens 1, 2, and 5, but tragically only had their base games and a pair of remakes as a result of what is widely theorized to be a cancelled Kalos follow-up installment. Gen 7's Ultra games actually had a better sales count and sell-through rate than B2W2 did relative to its base games, so maybe it takes the cake for "closest to perfect so far", especially since it had all three of base games, remakes (Let's Go), and a pair of follow-up games. However, I'm still going to count B2W2 and USUM as even here, since Gen 7 was influenced by being split between consoles and since your average sequel (73.08% of their base games) still has a better relative sell rate than USUM did for base Sun & Moon (56.13% of their base games). If you remove Gen 5 Unova from the equation, that 73.08% goes up to an even higher 79.28%. Finally, the Switch Era generations have been all over the place. The DLCs don't have watchable sales figures for themselves that I could find, but each of their base games has sold well enough to compensate for the lack of a true follow-up installment anyway. On top of that, Gen 8 and soon Gen 9 will both have a Pokémon Legends game, and Gen 8 even had the ILCA-licensed Sinnoh "remakes" for good measure. All of that, and still no paired sequels for Galar or Paldea, though again, I guess you could count The Indigo Disk as a Paldea or a Teal Mask sequel if you squint hard enough.
I'm sorry for such a long post, and thanks you if you read all the way through. The thing that upsets me about this enough to post about is that, when you stop and think about it, "the perfect generation", at least in the context of this post and my lists I made, would be a win-win scenario for the consumers (us) and the developers... maybe not every single time, but almost every time. Three installment generations sell more individual copies than two installment generations by default, but with that crucial fourth year and (should the need arise) help from another developer, both in an effort to avoid a rushed final product... well, we've seen how much the fans love Gens 3 and 4 for doing that. The mathematical perfect Pokémon generation, I guess you could call this, would be the best of both worlds- quality
and quantity compared to what we have gotten, and doing all this research makes me even more upset than I already was about some of the core series Pokémon games that were never released or even designed at all.
...oh, and one more thing. Shoutouts to HeartGold & SoulSilver
my beloveds for being both a sequel and a remake at the same time, the first and only time this has ever happened. No wonder they're some of my favorites.
