>>39053360The games are advertisements for the merch. This is how pokemania got so big, and how pokemon blew up in recent years.
Once you lose sight of that, and forget that large changes to the game mean large changes to your main form of marketing (as RSE showed us), you cause all that to tumble down.
People will stop buying merch if they do not like the games. Their merch isn't built like Hello Kitty where it sells no matter what. Pokemon is not too big to fail again.
