>>44020881For the last time, Masuda and Game Freak have nothing to do with any of the spin-offs. The only exception is that Masuda composed some of the music for Pokemon Go.
Game Freak is a former video game magazine that was turned into a game development company. The founders were Satoshi Tajiri (original creator and director of Pokemon), Ken Sugimori (art director) and Junichi Masuda (composer and minor programmer, went on to becoming the managing director after Tajiri took a back seat after Gold & Silver). They are solely responsible for creating the mainline Pokemon games and creating the new Pokemon designs.
The rights to Pokemon are split between Game Freak (the original creators of Red and Green), Nintendo (the publishers of Red and Green) and Creatures (a company that invested into the development of Red and Green when Game Freak had financial difficulties). Since Pokemon's popularity was exploding, a new company called The Pokemon Company was created to handle the management of the IP, which included merchandise, the anime and films, manga, spin-offs, the Pokemon Centers in Japan, etc. The president of TPC is Tsunekazu Ishihara, one of the founders of Creatures.
Pokemon Unite is a spin-off game developed by TiMi Studios, a subsidiary of Tencent. It is a joint venture between TPC and TiMi Studios, so Game Freak have nothing to do with it. It's an attempt for the Pokemon IP to branch out into other genres, they're specifically targeting the Chinese market with this game. The game looks shit, but it's being developed by a completely different studio so it's not like it's taking away any resources from the mainline games.
