Quoted By:
Pokemon can't be run into the ground, even if/when GF pisses off it's previous core audience, a brand new audience crops up to take it's place. SWSH spat in the face of nearly every long term Pokemon fan and still sold 18 million in like a year and will easily be pushing 25, 26 million by the end of the Switch's lifespan.
Even outside the main games, Pokemon GO brings in billions. Pokemon merch and the anime bring in even more money. GF committed highway robbery with LGPE and it didn't affect their bottom line one fucking bit because they still sold 10+ million copies and made who knows how much off of Pikachu+Eevee merch and the Pokeball Plus. And we aren't even at the bottom of the barrel yet with Pokemon Dream and whatever that PokeMOBA game was. Pretty soon we'll have Pokemon VR, Pokemon Shooter, Pokemon whatever the fuck.
Someone else put it really well; at this point, the games are just a formality to introduce new Pokemon to be sold as merchandise, the games don't HAVE to be good at all, they can be low budget as fuck because the reason they exist is just to give consumers a base on what toys to buy and what to look for in the anime. It's just like how comics don't mean shit in 2020, but are still getting made so people know what go see in the movie theater.
I hope no one ITT has any illusions about GF going anywhere, Pokemon doesn't need to improve to our standards when they make more than enough money as is. From a fan's standpoint all of this is disgusting, but from a business standpoint Pokemon is doing better than even Pokemania.
