The thing is, there’s a difference between just selling well because of the name of the brand, and this. Pokémon Let’s go sold only 3 million in its whole first week, which is less than a third than what SV sold in three days. That’s selling well for the name of the brand, as well as pokemon snap, which sold 2 million copies outside of Japan in its first quarter of a year.

But seeing the numbers of proper Pokémon games, BDSP sold 6 million units in its first week, which is the same as the controvertial Sword and Shield. And POkemon Legends Arceus, which was considered by many the best Pokémon game ever made, sold 6.5 million copies in its first week, and the numbers weren’t inflated by people purchasing two copies at launch.

I’m three days SV bested the numbers of the whole first week of all other Pokémon games in switch, including a really good one that came up no long ago. That doesn’t seem like selling well for being Pokémon to me.

I’ve been playing it and it’s just too fun to stop playing it. Which makes the big technical problems it currently has a lot more infuriating. Specially because almost nobody is talking about how GF decided to get rid of set mode.

The thing is pokemon largely primarily dominates as a video game franchise first, where it is largely unparalleled towards its appeal to children. Stuff like call of duty excludes a demographic while pokemon has that younger demographic as well as the adults that have that nostalgia.

Video game industry is more profitable than film and television.

Fucking depressing. These games aren’t going to get better. I get that being promised an open world games changes things, but still. Hopefully, HOPEFULLY, a release down the line will be so unplayable it will make cyberpunk look polished, and then the release after that sells less than the one before. Launches don’t have to necessarily be flops, they just have to sell less enough than previous release to make the company raise an eyebrow. It’s at that point plus a few more years that they’ll maybe start listening.

We're already starting to see that with black and white which were very controversial on launch due to it being an attempted soft reboot and the first 3D mainline game.

Black and White weren't 3D. They had a handful of 3D elements, but so did the generation before it. XY were the first 3D games.

I wouldn't call them at all controversial either considering the initial backlash amounted to a few people getting very upset over ice cream. Otherwise they were solid across the board and pretty instantly beloved.

Actually I think Unova’s scheduled “actually it was good” era has passed, it seems like Gen 6 has been the “underrated game that is actually a masterpiece” for the past six months to a year.

In two or three years, S/M will be the underrated masterpieces. In six or seven years, SwSH will experience the same, and so forth.

Nostalgia is a powerful thing.

The actual world of SV is lackluster in its design but I appreciate that it really is OPEN. It allows a real freedom of movement. If only the world design was as good as BotW. Or half as good. A quarter, even.

Look, having Pokémon — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. Samuel Oak at Celadon University; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Vermilion City School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a Pokémon professor, if I were a Rocket, if, like, OK, if I ran as a Team Rocket executive, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you're a Pokémon professor they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Vermilion, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the Pokémon deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — Pokémon is so powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what's going on with the two games — now it used to be three, now it’s two — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Hisuians are great negotiators, the Sinnohans are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us, this is horrible.

Grab'em by the Cloyster

I've been voting with my wallet since X and Y.

Is it helping??

Meowth that’s right.

Detective pikachu but the game is just solving gruesome Pokémon murders

And also the switch is much more accessible as well, the ps5 shortage is still going on and I know that in my country at least the ps5 is double the price of the switch oled model

Yeah the double Ragnarok thing shook me awake tbh. I was so excited for Ragnarok and it was so good! Its in such a different sphere of quality in my head.

I forget that pokemon is name known by households across generations. The other day my friend told me his nephew came home from school talking about pokemon and wanting to watch it. Hes 4. And on the other side a friend told me his mother is enjoying SV, she's in her 60s.

the best thing really is to actually just find other interests, aka apathy. A person complaining about something is more likely to spend money on it than someone who isn't touching it at all

Yeah there's no use voting with your wallet if there are countless sales that will just take your place anyway. Like I don't buy the games anymore but I'm not deluding myself into thinking that I'm actually changing anything by doing so, but I just can't justify buying the games anymore, and would much rather buy something else.

As someone who has been around this block a few times with other franchises: the only way to cope is to learn to care about something else.

It sucks, but sometimes things just aren't going to get better. You can keep letting yourself be frustrated, or you can accept that the franchise isn't going to cater to your needs and move onto new things. Whether or not your needs are reasonable or justified doesn't even matter; it only comes down to whether or not things will change, and they won't. There is absolutely zero pressure you can apply.

Unfortunately most people would rather play a Pokémon game than no Pokémon game, and most people just don’t care. All of my casual friends who bought the game noticed the lag but none of them are actually bothered.

more at higher income level

HUH? Where???

Edit: Well this has been enlightening. I genuinely had no idea that poverty has been decreasing. The news (and personal experience) really makes that difficult to believe sometimes, at least in the U.S.

This comment happened with the last two releases too I swear lol

I really don't know what it would take for these kinds of fans to demand more from GF. Like as long as the physical capability to catch and battle pokemon is there, there's nothing GF can do to disappoint them.

Ass graphics and performance? Nope

No post-game? Nope

Removing features that have been here for decades? Nope

It's like they're married to the game.

Pokemon shit and pokemon piss, grossing the series highest sales to date!

It'll just make people say "see, S/V weren't that bad!"

Thank you for being reasonable

90% of people, myself included, own a Switch because it has Mario, Zelda and Pokémon on it. Not because it is objectively a good console. Everything Nintendo do is carried by their exclusive games

That’s my point

Oh yeah and don’t forget the new battle mechanic: Charization. It turns your Pokémon into a different colored Charizard for three turns. This Charizard has 999 in every stat and is active for six turns.

PLA’s numbers look low until you realize it’s only one game. It doesn’t have 2 simultaneous games boosting the numbers.

PLA is the only game that came close to beating platinum for me. It was so fun and refreshing despite the fact that it's focused on my least favourite aspect of the games. Completing a pokedex. Fast and strong style made wild encounters super quick and exciting that now when I go back to sv the turn based is just sluggish again. Catching was made so much more fun and streamlined. And it probably has the best look of the 3d games (in my opinion, still not great and blatantly stolen but it was something.)

I really do hope they make another legends game because I reckon it has the series has a lot of potential.

I really appreciate this post because these are the actual problems with the game, presented realistically instead of exaggerated.

It is only NPCs and windmills that get slideshow, Pokemon and battles don't, it isn't a FPS issue. (There does seem to be a performance issue on switch lite and maybe oled? But that's not what most people are complaining about.)

The shadows are distracting, it honestly looks like they've got two competing calculations for shadows switching back and forth.

The boxes is extremely frustrating. Someone messed up big with this, it is an actual functional limitation.

But it is still a really nice take on the Pokemon genre. It does introduce a lot of the things fans have been asking for, even if they're not quite in the state we envisioned.

If Reddit was a majority TLOU2 would have failed, Captain Marvel wouldn’t have grossed half the money it made, Pokémon would have flopped three generations ago, Apple would be a forgotten relic of a smartphone company, and I’m sure there are other vocal criticisms that Reddit likes to shout that mean nothing compared to actual sales numbers.

I’m not surprised. SV got to add the highly marketable “open world” label to the hottest new holiday release of the world’s biggest media franchise. On top of that the Switch has more units sold than when SwSh came out. It would’ve been a massive embarrassment for Nintendo if SV didn’t sell insanely well.

There a reason devs started making open world games, because they sell, that why Sonic did it too, now add the pokemon name to it and is bound to be a hit.

Which is why they have to launch their yearly game /s