>>54680037>rushedWe know they absolutely did. The gigaleak revealed a lot of details about the major shift in Gen 7's design philosophy; from the removal of the PSS to reduce server load, to the reduction of map and mechanic design in order to accommodate Pokemon GO's eventual arrival. At some point, SM were to have direct compatibility with GO but that was scrapped in favor of creating LGPE as a Gen 1-only remake, and we got Alolan forms to fill in the type gaps.
The removal of the national dex played a big part in it too, as it was deemed less profitable to keep a record of everything in a single game rather than lock it behind a subscription based service like Bank. This eventually evolved into the current HOME situation we see today.
There's a lot of neat elements from that leak, like the beta protag that we can see in some concept art of SM presumably before the shift. The artstyle was a lot more similar to the full-scale models of Gen 6 instead of the weird gremlin-like halfway point we got in the final. I would have loved to see a non-butchered Alola or at least a version where they didn't need to shove in the Z-move gimmick or GO shit.
If you ever wonder why SWSH and SV run the way they do, it's because GameFreak is at the same state they were back in Gen 1 before Iwata documented all of their shit.
Pic related is from the readme of an internal tool from Gen 7's repo. Which, go figure, is the first game to get shoved out after Iwata died and have major performance issues on more than satisfactory hardware.
GameFreak is STRUGGLING and it’s all because of the Alolamutt nigger hallway LGBT region.