>>36094374Nintendo is a massive developer/publisher with offices around the world, dozens of first/second party development teams and thousands of employees contributing to the development of Nintendo IP and even with all of that Nintendo will still shelve underperforming IP. In Game Freak's case, they're a single developer with less than 150 employees and consistently resist growth and as a consequence of that, is forced to plan and execute their projects years ahead of their expected release, because they simply don't have the manpower to actively do more than one game at a time, so they rely on cascading their resources out at the beginning and end of development to spread themselves and their division of labor as far as possible.
They aren't comparable. Nintendo has enough resources that at any given time they don't use their entire development capacity, so any game or franchise that performs well will always have the priority and resources to support it. But that isn't the case for Game Freak, which has about enough employees to adequately handle about one proper game a cycle and splits employees to start the next project in order to min/max the effectiveness of their small team, even despite the difficulties that inevitably creates.
To put things into perspective, since Gen4 they have worked on a timetable more applicable to AAA titles than basic RPGs. They've spoken at length about the cycle before, the games really only take about 3 years to make, but when the next gen starts, the follow-up is finished (or it's being finalized) and the next has been actively worked on for at least a year by then.
If they were going to maintain two projects with their current process, they would literally need double the manpower they have now. The fact that LGPE is on its way and Gen8 is the upper next year, most likely means they're done and Gen8 wont have follow-ups and they're already planning what happens after 2019.
