>>44319551don't look at the sales for BW and BW2, look at the context
that was the time when twitter started to become mainstream, people were naive about it and GameFreak finally exposed itself to its hardcore fans, who were overwhelmingly angry about Gen V's changes, who were able to play BW around the same time as the JP release due to the advance of emulators
some of the criticisms were accurate. Gen V's graphics were shit, the pacing and level curve were awful, the desire to have a massive dex lead to a bunch of ugly shit sneaking into the dex, no day 1 support for online features, among others
GF's reaction to all the effort they put in to those games was to cut them out. if you listen to Iwata's direct introducing XY he clearly articulates how Masuda-led GF views Pokemon and how reinforcing that idea is GF's MO.
the negative reaction to SuMo and the SuMo anime just gets GF to double down even harder on the stupid shit
