>>43535467Well, Gen 9 is going to be absolute ass, I feel basically certain of that. I will say, though, that big corporations/franchises tend to have a lot of inertia to them. It's not uncommon for a company to put out a shitty iteration of a product which sells very well, only for the next iteration to sell poorly because they lost the goodwill that they'd built up to that point. Most recently, you saw this with Star Wars, where TFA did very well at the box office, TLJ was disappointing but not a flop, and then RoS was a massive bomb. We could see something like that happen as a result of SwSh, given that any enthusiasm around the game seems to have died out and yet I'm still hearing people talk about its many flaws.
I mean, shit, looking at /vp/'s catalog, almost no threads are about SwSh, and the ones that exist are either complaints/bait or about Pokegirls. Then again, the fact that the games sold as well as they did combined with the number of people who would practically foam at the mouth trying to defend them leads me to believe that Pokemon fans just have no standards when it comes to this franchise (seriously, the number of times I've heard "Well, it's Pokemon! :^)" is a little depressing). So that might not happen here.
>>43537413The problem with that is that Pokemon's audience basically consists of two groups: New kids who are just entering into the "8-13" demographic that Pokemon originally targeted, and older fans who are basically there for life. The kids who don't outgrow the franchise join the second group, which keeps their numbers pretty steady. That's why main series games have pretty consistently been selling 15-17 million units since Gen 3, which was almost two decades ago.
