>>55872110Natural fad decay as a result of the kids who first latched onto Pokemon growing up coupled with Sony being right there with the PS2. That batch clung onto Sony as a result, and the younger kids, wanting to emulate their superiors, similarly dropped Pokemon, especially not helped that the consolewars were reigniting with the "Mature Sony Games VS Kiddie Nintendo Land" angle, that shit killed Pokemon on the gaming side outside of autists and especially young kids who weren't aware of any of that.
Meanwhile on the show side kids were getting bored of how shitty and aimless Johto felt (which it in fact was, thanks to executive meddling forcing them to LITERALLY drop the ball with Kurt and hope no one noticed the quality drop all for the sake of Pokemon 4Ever) while other media was popping up into cultural relevancy.
Even TCGfags had Yu-Gi-Oh to look at now, both as a physical medium and as a video game.
