Pokemon Company Discussing on How to Ensure Quality With Regular Releases - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 13 August 2023 / 3,920 Views
The Pokemon Company Chief Operating Officer Takato Utsunomiya at the Pokemon World Championships in Yokohama, Japan said they are "having conversations" on how to ensure quality with future Pokémon games, while also keeping the regular release schedule.
"I think in general, if you look at the past, the path we’ve taken up until now has been this constant release, always regularly releasing products on a fairly fixed kind of a cadence, you might say," said Utsunomiya. "Always having these products able to be introduced and new experiences for our customers, and that’s how we’ve operated up until now.
"I think we’re still operating in that way, but there’s more and more conversations, as the development environments change, about how we can continue to do this, while making sure that we’re ensuring really quality products are also being introduced."
While last year's Pokémon Scarlet and Violet sold well the game had performance issues and glitches that have yet to be fixed. Game Freak, the developer the mainline Pokémon games, have released a new entry only almost every with only seven of the last 27 years not seeing a mainline release.
Thanks, Comic Book.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Hire more staff and allow more time between releases.
They might do the former, but the later is not happening.
Good that they are at least having conversations about it, but they seem to be dismissing the obvious solution: give the games more time in development. At minimum lengthen the three-year mainline game cycle to a four year cycle. And in addition to that hire more people, more people to polish graphics, more testers, etc.
Getter better engine, hire better programmers and release 1 game every 2-3 years. Or do like cod and have multiple teams taking turns. Having 2 in one year is why Scarlett is broken and looks damn ugly
I am not bothered by the cadence, I am bothered that the workload may be to great for the current team.
So a few things need to change... Either enlarge the team to allow a larger scope of work or introduce a second development team to flip-flop between releases to lengthen development time on individual titles.
A-La. Call of Duty.
An investment on technology and modern development tools wouldn't go astray either.
Why would they bother changing anything? Scarlet and Violet sold +20 million copies despite their absolute terrible state, myriad of lacking features and overmonetization. There is no incentive for them to not milk the series to the breaking point.
Pokemon is pretty much the only Nintendo franchise that hasn't really grown very much on the Switch. Sword/Shield sold about 50% better than X/Y, which isn't exactly bad, but compared to other Nintendo series? Mario Kart 8 Deluxe sold 3 times more than MK7. Breath of the Wild sold four times as much as Twilight Princess, the previous best-seller in the series. Animal Crossing sales this gen more than tripled. Super Mario Odyssey outsold 3D World by 4 to 1.
If Pokemon had the same sales boost, they would be selling something like 50 million copies per entry. At least SOMEBODY in the Pokemon Company must realize that those tens of millions of sales would be worth another few hundred staff.
Making a lot of easy money is good, but not as much as making a boatload of money.
The formula for game development is number of devs x time in development. If they are unwilling to reduce their release cadence (basically at least one mainline Pokemon game each year on average) as they suggest here, then their only options are to staff up their current studios like Gamefreak and Creatures Inc. and ILCA, or to bring in more studios to assist as well. More studios working on the franchise would allow them to put more manhours into each game while still allowing them to release roughly one mainline Pokemon game per year on average.
They really like to use the word "product"...
Pokemon rpg
As if the Pokemon Company gives a shit about quality nowadays.
You either need longer dev cycles or a LOT more manpower.Game Freak had 169 employees as of 2022, Creatures has another 232, for 401 combined. The devs that pump out big games on a near annual basis have a lot more people than that: Ubisoft Montreal has 4000, the four main Call of Duty studios have a combined 1500 employees, EA Vancouver needs 1300 employees to make FIFA and NHL games annually, Blizzard's five teams have a combined 4700 employees, etc.
You can either have a smaller team that is more tightly knit and releases games less regularly, OR you can become a massive studio that releases AAA games on a regular basis. You can't do both.
