>>5709179725 years' life experience observing the thing and playing the core games. If it persisted beyond Gen 3, it was going to run. They didn't change the Gen 1 formula at all, just updated it, knowing the user base would naturally and organically refresh every three years. Take those generations of kids, grow them up and subject them to reality and social norms for 20 years, you get people coupling up and beginning to have rugrats, sending them off to school to start talking about pokémon 'cause their friends are, while in the background the evolution of the gaming industry and rise of causal mobile gamers unlocked gouging adults of money the way their mech offerings had hammered kid piggy bank and pocket money tallies since '96 and Nintendo beginning to shit out merch to capitalise on the brand's popularity, due to a large percentage of adults being familiar with the series in some fashion and being offered a free-to-play experience, with enough hooks to tempt them into handing money off. When that proved successful, they said "Fuckit, we'll try and get the cumskulls", leading to Masters (EX) and another revenue stream from people otherwise not spending money on Pokémon beyond potentially the core games every year (which is nothing to do with TPC thus irrelevant and worthless to their aims of supplementing the core games' earnings with its own). Game Freak don't care if I play GO, but TPC sure as fuck do. Just as they don't care I played the core series the better part of my life, because I was never in the primary demographic while Pokémon was a thing to subsequently buy into the rest the spin-off shite they were pumping out to push the brand.
