>>39031029>had the funds to easily quadruple their workforceIt's funny, because you'd think that'd be the case, but it's not.
Gamefreak is a small company of 150-ish workers, all split between at least three separate projects. By comparison, the recent Mario and Zelda titles all had 300-ish people working on them, each.
The big problem is, the licencing and royalty rights to Pokemon screws Game Freak over hardcore. The games themselves don't sell as much as the other merch, and GF only gets a third of the sales from the games, (Split with Nintendo and Creatures Inc) they don't get revenue from anything else. That's all Nintendo and Creatures.
BUT, because of licensing issues, only Game Freak is allowed to make (or give permission for someone else to make) Pokemon games. Nintendo can't just assign the next Pokemon to EAD and automatically have a billion dollar budget, nor would GF want them to, because Pokemon are their bread and butter.
