>>49101370ORAS did nearly kill the franchise but it was the awkward gap year in 2015 afterwards when they really needed to save it, but instead they just had a bunch of promotional material all year that implied Z would be coming and it never did. That was the real near fatal blow and I'll never understand why they didn't do a gap year in 2014 when people would be satisfied with XY, rather than rushing into the next game that left us right before a climax that never happened and kept us hanging for a year before dropping it for an entirely new plotline.
SM took the main fallout for this from pushback building up for years and wrongly so, but it didn't come close to saving the franchise, it barely kept it on life support for a year. USUM helped a little but still not enough, LGPE was like kicking a hospital patient in the balls and while SWSH was still pretty bad for the first six months it showed enough promise for the future, I believe that it indirectly helped save the franchise but at a major cost.
