>>29296007Speaking as someone who was obsessed with Pokemon since the 2000s and has played every mainline game and XD/Colo on an emulator, Pokemon was way too expensive to purchase because of all the prices of the consoles.
Back in the day, Ninty never sold Pokemon on any of the consoles we bought (PS2, Wii) so I said fug it and emulated every single Pokemon game. In between fangames like GPX Plus, those crappy browser based pokemon games and showdown you can almost get the same experience. Not to mention romhacks and RMXP fangames.
Pogo's draw is that you don't need to buy a console to play a featureless and boring game which costs almost twice as much as the game, and to be frank all of Nintendo's games are shit other than Pokemon so purchasing a console would be a complete waste even if you could install every single CIA for free. Just because I can pirate every game from Skyrim to what have you on PC it doesn't mean that I'm going to bother playing them because as far as I care - they're all shit. Not to mention that one has to learn all the lingo with homebrew and how to avoid bricking it and how to make sure it's on the right firmware (with bigger things like phones and computers, that is terribly easy to avoid and you have an easy way out of it.)
Buying an app for a smartphone is a two step process of button clicking. Pirating something is also far easier than getting a console. And as for the consoles themselves, they are just another item to carry around with you, with a far worse processor and worse graphics than either my computer or my phone.
Unless the proper games were sold on phones and/or computers I doubt that SM is ever going to sell well. I would buy the game if it was sold on a platform that I had access to if not purely for the ability to trade and battle with my mons online but new consoles can go stick itself. No one ever walks around carrying a console whereas everyone carries a phone.
Consoles are second class in many ways.
