I’m 31 years old, I’m married, I’ve got a 2 year old daughter, I’ve got a mortgage and I’m starting to plan for retirement. I was in 3rd grade when Pokemon came to America (or at least that’s my earliest memory) and I’ve loved it ever since. I’ve supported every main series game and most of the spin-offs. I was a manager at GameStop for a few painful years and I was always so happy to see people of all ages come in and celebrate Pokemon. But after today, I just feel like I’m never again going to be the target customer for Pokémon, and it’s probably time I move on.

When they said that today there would be a separate announcement for their next project I thought that this was finally D/P/Pl remakes. That’s my own fault for assuming that.

However, when I saw that they were releasing a Pokemon moba (made by tencent nonetheless) I not only felt disappointment, I felt forgotten. The Pokemon company does not care about my opinion, and I know they never have, but it felt like they were at least still committed mostly to the main games, which is what I cared about most. Now I know they don’t care about the main series games.

They’ll still make them, of course, but it will never be the same. And why should it? Think about this; they can spend all this money making a new main series game and sell 20 million copies, but that still isn’t where they make most of their money. All of the micro transactions across all of the mobile games, selling the trading cards, selling merchandise, advertising from their shows, that all makes more money than a singular purchase of one $60 game. They don’t need to revolutionize the format, they just need to do the bare minimum to keep their loyal fan base spending their money across the digital cornucopia they offer, which is to just release a low effort main title every 3+ years.

Today showed me that it’s probably not going to get better, and I’m not the target audience anymore. For the first time I feel too old for Pokémon...