>>58415706>sales fell by almost 8 millionThere are simply more games in Gen 1 tier being compared to Gen 2. Look at it like this.
Four titles in Gen 1, Red/Green/Blue/Yellow, and total combined sales are 46.02 million. That's about 11.5m per title.
Gen 2 had 3 titles, Gold, Silver and Crystal, total sales are 30. That's 10m per title.
Gen 3 had 5 titles, combined sales are 35.28. That's 7m per title.
No one is going to sit here and deny that Pokemon was fading in gen 2. But it hadn't faded yet. Pokemania was at its peak in 1999. Gen 2 games released a year after that, in October 2000. There was a significant decline by then, but it wasn't a complete wash. There was still interest in gen 2. It's easier to understand it if you simply look at a single, smaller nation like Japan. Red and Green in Japan sold 8.2m titles. Gold and Silver sold 7.1m. Ruby and Sapphire sold 5.4m. The very first game Masuda directed, Crystal, is the lowest selling game in the franchise to this day, in both Japan and globally. That's Masuda in a nutshell.
Pokemon series hovered at 5m sales per title in Japan for decades. Do you know what made it escape that? The post-Masuda era, starting with SM, and peaking at SV. SV in Japan was 8.6m. It surpassed the original Red/Green in sales. This is how you get out of the fad phase.
