You guys are all circling, but missing the point. The contractual way gamefreak, pokemon company, and Nintendo is set up provides gamefreak only with ~1/3 of game revenue with merch and movie sales shared by poke co and Nintendo. We can ask for more developers or more time, but it really boils down to gamefreak needs a better share of the pot to actually show off their skills. ... But merch makes much much much more money than games, so games have sadly become a means of pushing merch at Gamefreak's and gamers' expense.
One third of the money made by Pokémon games is still
a heck of a lot of money. Even if you don't count merchandise.
Consider Xenoblade Chronicles 2, for instance. It's a fairly well-known game with a big-ish budget behind it, it gained mostly positive reviews, is Monolith Soft's best-selling game so far. I'd say it is a reasonably successful game, and graphically it's a few dozen steps ahead of Pokémon.
It sold 2 million copies. Barely a tenth of Sword and Shield. For a lower average unit price too, I might add, considering SwSh's DLC. Yet it's still hailed as a commercial success. Any game studio outside of the triple-A sphere would consider such sales a very good result.
Or take Monster Hunter Rise. Eight million copies sold. One third of SwSh, and the developer seems to be jumping with joy over those numbers. If Game Freak were to receive one third of the money from Sword and Shield (which I'd consider unrealistically low, given that they made the game), they'd still make as much as Capcom made on Monster Hunter Rise. And looking at the two games side by side, I would be horribly surprised if SwSh's budget was even remotely comparable to MHR's.
Want another comparison? Resident Evil Village. It was a bit of a big deal when it came out a couple of years back. Five million copies sold. Less than a quarter of Sword and Shield.
The Pokémon media empire is huge and merchandise revenue dwarfs out the money the games make. That's true. But that doesn't mean the games are "side ventures" in any way. It's not like Game Freak barely sustains themselves on the game revenue. Even if they only saw one third of the revenue from each game, their slice of the pie would still be up there with many AAA titles, and as repeatedly stated,
they release a game every year. Take the aforementioned Monster Hunter series by Capcom. One third the sales of Pokémon, and games released every three years. On average it would take the studio three installments to match the sales of
one Pokémon game, and in the meantime Game Freak would have released
six or seven pairs of games.
So yeah, the games are a small part of Pokémon's total revenue - but they are still
insanely profitable. Their profit margins are presumably a well-guarded secret, but it would surprise me if any other game franchise (outside the mobile market) come anywhere close. They pop out new instalments annually, yet each of them sells like an AAA title with seven years of dev time by hundreds of people. Pokémon's "sales per year" figure must be off the charts, because the franchises that can even compete in terms of "sales per installment" take many years between each game. Game Freak meets those numbers
annually.
That's partially why their subpar quality is starting to annoy people, I guess. Insane money is being made, and it's put toward games that wouldn't have stood out much on consoles two generations ago.
If your issue with Pokemon is that it doesn't change its core gameplay loop play a different game lmao
The core gameplay loop is not the problem, really. As proven by our continued dedication to the series, it is a very enjoyable one, and it's reinforced by solid mechanics. If there hadn't been any fun at the core, we wouldn't have kept playing. But the
execution feels stuck in the past.
Take the order in which things happen during battles, for instance. By that I don't mean the concept of turn-based battles, but rather the
information flow. It's incredibly linear and stilted, usually experienced as "Animation plays out, then a text box appears that explains the animation, then an animation for a side effect plays out, then a text box explaining the effect pops up, then the next animation plays" and there are minimal options to skip past any of it. For a concrete example, try walking through a cave, without Repels, with a Pokémon whose ability is Intimidate at the start of your party. So many instances of repeated animations and messages you've seen a bajillion times before, just so you can get to the "get away" button and walk a few steps to experience the same thing over again.
Or take navigation in the overworld. We're looking at quite tiny, bland environments, sparsely populated with creatures with limited animations (and NPCs that are even worse in that regard), that pop in and out of existence a few meters away, with minimal interaction with each other or their surroundings. Not that you can do much of that yourself, either. Your options are mostly limited to running into things, or pressing one "interact" button that barely involves any animations.
And the less we say about cutscenes, the better. In
every way.
It's not difficult to see where the frustration is coming from. We constantly see other games, from lesser-known franchises, that put down bigger budgets and more dev times to make games that look
vastly better than Pokémon, and sustain themselves without selling a fraction of what Game Freak does. When playing the Pokémon games you will still have a lot of fun, but it's getting difficult to ignore that they could have been executed
so much better (both in light of the state of the industry and the available resources to develop the games). It's hard not to ask yourself why they aren't. And I'm finding it increasingly difficult to come up with an answer to this question that doesn't frustrate me to heck and back.
