How did Pokémon, the most successful media franchise in the world, go from making greatness, to making Scarlet and Violet? The creators know what’s happening...
Vote with your wallet, and they’ll make a good game again
People are voting with their wallet, you just don’t like the results.
At the end of the day, people who post on places like Reddit and especially even more niche communities like lemmy making up a meaningless percentage of the gaming market. And expecting the entire market to cater to your personal whims is just unrealistic.
The video game market encompasses people who buy Pokemon games and FIFA games is the same market where people buy Baldur’s Gate 3, Witcher 3, Factorio, etc. All you can do is buy and play games and you enjoy and go from there.
The masses don’t seem to understand that not every piece of media related to a franchise you enjoy is good. More of a thing isn’t always good. They will keep pumping out progressively worse and worse garbage because the fans will slurp up anything with the right branding.
Same reason why movies are becoming more and more dumb shallow “spectacles” that can barely hold the audience’s micro attentions. No substance because it might scare away the box office numbers on opening week.
In this industry, and specifically for pokemon, a huge portion of total purchases are done by parents for their children. Children don’t understand or care, and parents aren’t motivated to deny their children pokemon games based on their quality.
Pokemon, as a product, has very little incentive to improve. This is also an observable effect in the music industry.
Against a massive multimedia empire, supporting a competitor is far likely to induce change anyway. Unfortunately, that requires real action, and not just complaining about it…
The problem is that, with a thing like Pokemon, something that people like specifically, “supporting the competitor” isn’t really a choice to many people. They don’t want a better turn-based monster fighting game, they want a better Pokemon game. They’re much more inclined to just stop playing because playing something else isn’t going to fill the base desire goal here.
I see the same thing in MtG. There are issues in the game I think could be improved on, but the problems I have aren’t going to be solved for me by playing some other tcg because my interest isn’t in tcg’s in general, it’s in MtG specifically. If the problems ever get bad enough, my only real choice will be to stop entirely, not play something else that I’m simply not interested in.
It doesn’t have to be better. Just competitive enough to have some legs. Hearthstone is why WotC finally started transitioning away from Magic Online.
But I get it. I love MtG myself (and as a Limited player, I don’t actually have any real suggestions for improvement with the game itself, we’ve been eating so good for years now), but it’s too expensive. The publisher is scummy. None of that is changing anytime soon.
Tangentially, if fans passionate about properties this old genuinely want to act, they should be actively fighting for copyright reform. Both of the properties we’re discussing here would be public domain by now under a macroeconomically-sound copyright regime.
Just to clarify, my point is that better or not doesn’t matter to a lot of people where preference outweighs anything else. I totally agree that competition is the biggest motivating factor for change in a company, but it gets tricky when we’re talking about products that are as specific as Magic or Pokemon. Like with me, I’ve tried so many other digital and paper tcg’s and none of them interest me. These aren’t like kitchen appliances or something that can just be traded out. They often fill a particular niche that a person is looking to satisfy.
100% with you on copyright (and trademark) reform, though. That shit is a cancer on society.
Not that it’ll ever make enough of a dent in their profits to make any difference anyway, but this could also swing the other way. If nobody buys their games because they’re bad, the impression those in control could get is that Pokemon games are no longer profitable rather than there being a need to make them better.
The answer is pretty simple. People continue spending money. Vote with your wallet, and they’ll make a good game again
People are voting with their wallet, you just don’t like the results.
At the end of the day, people who post on places like Reddit and especially even more niche communities like lemmy making up a meaningless percentage of the gaming market. And expecting the entire market to cater to your personal whims is just unrealistic.
The video game market encompasses people who buy Pokemon games and FIFA games is the same market where people buy Baldur’s Gate 3, Witcher 3, Factorio, etc. All you can do is buy and play games and you enjoy and go from there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
if personal whims include not making a bad game
Expecting a bit much from people.
The masses don’t seem to understand that not every piece of media related to a franchise you enjoy is good. More of a thing isn’t always good. They will keep pumping out progressively worse and worse garbage because the fans will slurp up anything with the right branding.
Same reason why movies are becoming more and more dumb shallow “spectacles” that can barely hold the audience’s micro attentions. No substance because it might scare away the box office numbers on opening week.
All of this is fundamentally the truth
In this industry, and specifically for pokemon, a huge portion of total purchases are done by parents for their children. Children don’t understand or care, and parents aren’t motivated to deny their children pokemon games based on their quality.
Pokemon, as a product, has very little incentive to improve. This is also an observable effect in the music industry.
Against a massive multimedia empire, supporting a competitor is far likely to induce change anyway. Unfortunately, that requires real action, and not just complaining about it…
The problem is that, with a thing like Pokemon, something that people like specifically, “supporting the competitor” isn’t really a choice to many people. They don’t want a better turn-based monster fighting game, they want a better Pokemon game. They’re much more inclined to just stop playing because playing something else isn’t going to fill the base desire goal here.
I see the same thing in MtG. There are issues in the game I think could be improved on, but the problems I have aren’t going to be solved for me by playing some other tcg because my interest isn’t in tcg’s in general, it’s in MtG specifically. If the problems ever get bad enough, my only real choice will be to stop entirely, not play something else that I’m simply not interested in.
It doesn’t have to be better. Just competitive enough to have some legs. Hearthstone is why WotC finally started transitioning away from Magic Online.
But I get it. I love MtG myself (and as a Limited player, I don’t actually have any real suggestions for improvement with the game itself, we’ve been eating so good for years now), but it’s too expensive. The publisher is scummy. None of that is changing anytime soon.
Tangentially, if fans passionate about properties this old genuinely want to act, they should be actively fighting for copyright reform. Both of the properties we’re discussing here would be public domain by now under a macroeconomically-sound copyright regime.
Just to clarify, my point is that better or not doesn’t matter to a lot of people where preference outweighs anything else. I totally agree that competition is the biggest motivating factor for change in a company, but it gets tricky when we’re talking about products that are as specific as Magic or Pokemon. Like with me, I’ve tried so many other digital and paper tcg’s and none of them interest me. These aren’t like kitchen appliances or something that can just be traded out. They often fill a particular niche that a person is looking to satisfy.
100% with you on copyright (and trademark) reform, though. That shit is a cancer on society.
People still paying for Pokemon games? I just use roms since they are just all copy and paste.
Game freak why the fuck did you turn Pokemon into vehicles? Wtf is wrong with you?
Not that it’ll ever make enough of a dent in their profits to make any difference anyway, but this could also swing the other way. If nobody buys their games because they’re bad, the impression those in control could get is that Pokemon games are no longer profitable rather than there being a need to make them better.
Red and Blue are held together with hope and dreams. They’ve always been like this.
people won’t care