insert image of the materialisation of the concept of competition ass fucking and cumming inside the equally gay and nerdier materialisation of the concept of innovation
It absolutely was for a week. There is no content beyond breeding pals and the second you Google anything the game is boring. No story, no interesting fights, everything is level based and the second you are within 5 levels of something you can kill it.
That’s the thing, it doesn’t matter if your game has world class graphics, diversity, originality, innovation, or is made by a great team of people, all that matters is that playing it IS FUN. Seems all these studios are forgetting that part.
Exactly this. I havent played a pokemon game in 10+ years because theyre ALL the same. I played palworld start to finish and loved every second of it, in my head its the pokemon game we deserved and what fans have been wanting for DECADES. Its just sad that it took an indie company to do it instead of nintendo with its billions.
After nintendo sued them for copying the 'throwing a ball to capture monsters', i said im out, cant support that company any more.
The only issue is that it has basically no artistic merit and is basically a tech demo that exists purely to say 'look at what you could have done with your IP' instead of doing anything interesting. It has no identity other than 'pokemon clone with guns' in the public mind and frankly, the worst mainline pokemon games absolutely style on it in terms of tone, writing, and consistency.
Shit on nintendo all you want, but if you choose to uplift the brain rot, don't be surprised when everything falls to shit.
It’s not even a ripoff of pokemon. It’s ark with creatures where a lot of them are very similar to pokemon. People keep saying it’s pokemon with guns but it’s not even close.
Thats a fault of where it's positioned in the market and the deliberate aesthetic overlap.Â
People who are capital G gamers and 'in' on the scene know that. But the average consumer doesn't. Thats not how the public consciousness works. You can try to deny it but you throw balls and cute, furry fuckers with elemental affinity. If you say that and think of anything but Pokemon, the largest and most valuable franchise on earth, you're cracked.
to be fair, they have introduced new stuff, the problem is all the new stuff is worse than the old stuff lol. Pixel-era Pokemon was still the best, everything after has been a bit weird and ultra gimmicky.
Black and White 2 just feels like literal perfection having a beloved style, story and there is so much content to do. I wish they would make a proper pixel game again, but that's a fever dream.
I'm personally very fond of ORAS though lmao. I played Black first, but it's the main pokemon game I spent several times more than the others at about ~500 hours. I actually loved Scarlet's gaameplay but I only sunk 120~ and that's several times more than the usual of 30 or so like Shield 💀
I do recommend the DSI XL for the sprite pokemon games lol. It's the perfect ratio + a vibrant dual IPS. They're pretty cozy to hold too compared to my floppy 3DS LL. (N3DSes did fix that though.)
True, today‘s content in games is 50% slapping PBR materials and reflections on everything so the graphics will help sell it. Sometimes I believe having to be clever with your resources on limited hardware also made people to come up with interesting mechanics and ideas. Many mechanics today are more like good coding practices but from a players perspective more like who asked for this to begin with? Eastern devs still mostly get it but western studios somehow forgot this ancient knowledge over the last 10 years. Just go back and play any rpg from 15 years ago and you can spot and feel the difference in like 15 minutes and see why they are shutting down one after another. It’s the same reason why anime pretty much replaced all tv shows for my generation and the ones afterwards. I can’t name a single tv show that runs in western tv channels.
There was a plot line where you have to fight a Hypno over a child but I think Hypno was protecting the kid and you were just meant to think it was a kidnapping.
There is a Drowzie who kidnaps a child in the pokemon mystery dungeon games though
Black and White 2 just feels like literal perfection having a beloved style, story and there is so much content to do. I wish they would make a proper pixel game again, but that's a fever dream.
I'm personally very fond of ORAS though lmao. I played Black first, but it's the main pokemon game I spent several times more than the others at about ~500 hours. I actually loved Scarlet's gaameplay but I only shit.
I genuinely think teras is mechanically the best system they've created post gen 4. However, conceptually mega evolutions were my favorite.
The problem with megas was that competitively it was terrible and pokemon traditionally does not update fast enough to fix the limited pool of viable pokemon.
This is the game where Landorous terrorized competitive for like 3 gens straight and is still meta.
I'll say this everywhere and anywhere -- If anyone is looking for a better version of a pokemon-style game, play Monster Sanctuary! It is a platform jumper and turn-based monster catching game that involves a whole lot more strategy and team compositions than pokemon!
What I love about Monster Sanctuary is the skill trees involved with each monster, which allows you to play each monster in different ways, AND the order in which moves you use really comes into effect! It is a super fun and strategic-minded game! So much better than pokemon IMO. And its cheap! I bought it on sale for $4.99 a few weeks ago and can't stop playing!
and it’s just not enough time to polish the games as well as they did 15+ years ago.
The games were never polished because GameFreak's dev. team kind of bites. It took Iwata coming in to actually fix the damn things for them to even function.
Nintendo had similar issues in the 80s and early 90s and also relied on HAL's staff--who actually knew what they were doing--to clean up the unworkable software they churned out. GameFreak just never really evolved the way Nintendo's in-house dev teams have.
Which looks like a problem to me since they make billions selling their games. How much more successful could they be if they committed more resources to making games?
Pokemon is the highest grossing franchise in history. They could lose billions of euros on the games every year and still profit from it. They can hire an army of programmers, game designers and artist, pay them three times the asked wages an let them loose on making games for years, all on the proceeds of one plushy line.
It's folk wisdom that you can't buy yourself into being a great artist. Welp, the wise folk have never seen the Pokemon company. Because it can literally do that, at major loss, without breaking a sweat.
The shit games they make now are a choice. Not a product of circumstance. Not a "on shucks, can't be helped". They choose to make terrible games.
They wouldn't be. Generation 5 was the highest quality generation with a lot of innovations, new mechanics and the most fleshed out post game and side content the series has ever had and sold the worst in the series. Then right after that x and y shipped half finished and was the best selling game in the series other than the original red and blue.
Pokemon sells because of brand recognition and advertising, not because the games are good and TPC knows this and it's why the games have been consistently bad since then. Nintendo cares about their image and would never release a game in the state X and Y and sword and shield and scarlet and violet were in but since game freak is a 2nd party studio and it still sells they don't give a shit
Nintendo doesn’t make pokemon and game freaks dev team for mainline games is actually surprisingly small. Not defending them just saying they even put the poke dollars so they’re making money from all ends not just games
Nah, indie teams tend to put a lot of effort and heart into their games (not always, I'm aware). Recent pokemon releases look exactly how I'd expect a company resting on their laurels and just cashing in on brand recognition with minimal effort to look.
They barely scraped by in 2024 with $1.5 billion in (net) profits, and people expect them to be able to continue to be able to pay their 7,724 employees without raising the price of their games?
I mean, if Nintendo tried to give every employee (including janitors and customer service) a paltry $175,000 annual salary increase, they'd barely have (net) profitted $200,000,000 last year.
People need to grow up, no business can be expected to survive like that!
The saddest part about modern gaming is the developer companies are making huge profits but then they layoff the actual developers that made the game.
God forbid you share the profits with the people most responsible for them. No. We gotta give all that money to the CEO that keeps making bone-headed decisions.
Nintendo specifically is pretty famous for doing very few layoffs though. They prioritize long term talent retention way more than most game companies, especially in the west.
You're correct they don't do profit sharing though. And they are still a public company so they do prioritize profits and shareholder benefits in the form of dividends.
Japan expects loyalty from their employees and shockingly frequently actually shows loyalty back. Their work hour expectations are a nightmare, especially for people who want to have families, but they otherwise do treat their workers a lot better than the US does easily
I mean, in Japan a man can spend practically Zero time with his family and still be considered a good family guy, East Asian societies are kind of like that, even Hindus MENA and Latinos who work ridiculous hours still value spending time with their families in a way that's just alien to Asians
Not even defending how brutal the working hours can get, but it's a completely different culture
I mean I am talking about Japan in general, not just Japanese game development. I have worked with several international workers from Japan and they have talked about the good and bad of the different work cultures through casual conversations. Which generally all jived with other anecdotes I have seen from others with similar experiences.
Like most studios go through "crunch" the same as any Japanese developer. That isn't in contention. The overall point is that Japanese studios rarely lay people off compared to western studios. Hell I can even dig up new stories showing Higher ups are Nintendo cutting their own salary in lieu of layoffs. This is a "well known" thing about their work culture.
So japan doesn't "Expect" loyalty, it's more that they are treated for and aren't at risk for getting fired? Seems quite different compared to the US where you can get fired after being "loyal" for decades like the music producer for halo at bungie.
Look, I know what you're trying to say, but it's ridiculous. Every country has problems and hyper focusing on japan's one core issue is hardly the big contention point people think it is.
Versus the US? Buddy the US has some of the worst labour laws in the entire world lmao. The same US that's self destroying itself? I do not understand how anyone can even remotely use the US as an argument for anything in 2025 against any country lmao.
The US lays off people in droves there's no other country as bad as the US for this. So no, I entirely disagree with you because it's nonsense to think toxic work culture is even remotely as bad as the risk of not having a roof over your head because you lost your job.
redditors and facts? No it's only about feelings here. Monopolies are bad (except when it's steam) and Nintendo is bad because inflation and global economics. Angry at games being $20 more and not the bag of chips that is $7 a bag or eggs that are $15. Lmao.
If gamers actually spend as much effort hating on publishers as they did voting maybe things would improve in the world.
The saddest part about modern gaming is the developer companies are making huge profits but then they layoff the actual developers that made the game.
"Money people" on one side and creatives and code wizards on the other. People might wonder how games can bring so much joy, but the gaming industry always seems to have something lined up to try and cram down consumers' throats against their will. Let it be a mystery no longer.
That's actually a lot lower then I expected it to be
if Nintendo tried to give every employee (including janitors and customer service) a paltry $175,000 annual salary increase, they'd barely have (net) profitted $200,000,000 last year.
I get what your saying but $200 million wouldn't be a lot for reinvestment into developing new games...they work on these for years with teams of dozens of developers at minimum...now I'm not saying I understand their development system or payment schedule but $200 mil would disappear real quick
For reference Tears if the Kingdom was in production for 6 years despite being able to reuse parts of Breath if the Wild code...and there were 300 of them
300 salaries x theoretical $175k is already $52.5 million...and they put out multiple games a year so multiple teams working before even considering the overhead of running the company that following year
$200m mil doesn't go as far these days on this scale :/
I get what youre saying and youre right but the guy youre replying to is referencing profit which included reductions for operation costs and payroll, and said giving huge salary raises to all the people doing that work still left them with 200mil profit for the year. the 200mil in that example wouldn't be going into the costs youre talking about and would be saved for the rougher parts
again, youre right, if their revenue somehow craters the following year
People need to grow up, no business can be expected to survive like that!
Unironically, yes. Games are inherently a feast-or-famine industry. When you're doing well and have a hit on your hands, you need to be building up reserves. Otherwise the next Dreamcast/Wii U/PS Vita just bankrupts you.
Nah they need the stockpile to weather the bad years of a flop like wiiU. That's one reason why they can keep doing experimental and weird stuff, because they can afford it.
I'm confused. They are already killing it (EA has a 19.84%Â operating margin).
I mean, cool and great for them if they manage to pull it off . . .
but also they have like 7k employees and are hand over fist raking it in; so, all considered . . . kinda greedy. Not making more money when you are almost double some of your large competition's margins isn't going to harm your business.
Going from 33% margin to 19% is bad for business regardless how much youre profiting. That means you're spending more money to make less. That's no good.
Incoming, "but they're a business that needs to make money," comments. Funny thing about being a business is we don't have to support their business decisions by buying their products either. Nintendo needs the Sega treatment fr. We all know what happened to the dream cast.
We found him.
We found the guy in the picture.
Tell me guy in the picture, how exactly does a digital game with quarter baked features we had in 2017 sudden justify a price increase?
Are you under the impression that because I criticize a companies greedy decision now I am unable to criticize the ones made in the past as well? Nintendo has been consistently making awful consumer harming decisions for decades.
All companies will do horrible things for money. Nintendo isn’t unique in that regard.
The only companies that don’t are ones that think their good reputation is a way to get even more money. You think Costco hot dogs are that price from the goodness of their heart?
If Sony could get away with as many anti-consumer practices as Nintendo, or charge as much for video games, they would. That’s how free market capitalism works.
So your stance to me escentially saying "this is shit" is "everything's shit just not quite as much as this particular shit so get used to it! Freemarket hoorah!"
Mate. It's shit even by shit standards.
"If Sony could get away with as many anti-consumer practices as Nintendo, or charge as much for video games, they would."
I am aware. And if they did I would be right here saying their shit too. (and they are shit for their own reasons no doubt)
I will criticize wrong when I see it no matter the source and no matter how many people push their glasses up saying" um achually u don't understand economics and why this is really a good thing 🤓"
It is tho. Nintendo don't have to stay competitive to maintain their market and consumer base. They could literally release $60 games and they'd be fine. This is explicitly just to make more money. Game development has explicitly gotten cheaper for a company like Nintendo who don't care about cutting edge graphics or detailed engines for stuff like physics. Its just greed.
Reddit isn't the place to find a nuanced discussion about inflation, sustainability and market forces. Price go up just means greedy corpos trying to steal our hard earned money, obviously.
1.5 billion? Wow, that's a lot of money. Tell me, what's their operating cost? How much do they need to make a month to keep everything rolling? How much does it cost them to design and program a new game? What's their overhead? Server costs? Legal costs? Regulatory costs? HR costs? What's their projections look like?
If you knew anything about the gaming industry beyond "Ooh look, fun game", then you would have known this has been a long time coming. Maybe try using your brain instead of calling everyone else who does a dork.
Well, in that case, Nintendo should just pack it up. Jmichealstark said the price increase is unnecessary, and we all know how much Jmichealstark knows about business and economics.
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u/Mughalbadsha12 1d ago
leave the billion dollar corporation alone theyre just a small indie team