>>41520483GF has never been good developers, and their growing pains have been glaringly apparent to even the average person the moment they went to 3D development. Their weird dev cycles have almost always been carried by sticking with 2D.
The moment they hit 3D, everyone knew they were out of their league but still held onto the hope that they would find their ground and shape up. They never did.
It means they had to rush even more than they had to before. It means they probably had to stretch out the little budget they have even more (and that budget probably got cut for mobile games, considering the head of TCP publicly stated he expected the Switch to fail and assumed the future of gaming is in mobile).
GF wants to focus their innovation and ideas on their side projects, like Little Town Hero. As they've stated in a few interviews, these side projects are meant to give life to the studio, with the implication that working on Pokemon all the time leads to monotony.
And finally, they know that no matter what they dish out, it'll sell like hotcakes on brand loyalty itself. They were probably a little shaken by the pre-release backlash that the internet threw; this is evident by Turner not being able to keep a cool head and salt re-tweeting a "y'all some entitled cunts" tweet. But now that the game is released and sales are through the roof, I'm sure they're sighing in relief that their calculations weren't wrong. They can put as little effort as they want in the games, and it will STILL pay off.
So what went wrong with the games? GF doesn't care, TPC doesn't care, consumers don't care, so why bother trying? Why put more into it when your staff isn't even interested in working on it? Why put more into it when the bare bones will carry the games? As long as the games work (even if they crash every now and then) they'll be fine.
