Pokemon first became a phenomenon on the back of the tv series. Anyone who was a child in the late 90s/early 00s understands this.
Pokémon Sword and Shield Sells 16 MILLION in 1.5 months
- Thread starter Nikachu
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Thanks for the in depth explanation and I do appreciate taking the time to explain where you were coming from. But you don't have to feel like my post was meant to criticize you for not wanting negativity.
Actually, my post was mainly focusing on you saying that internet discussion tends to be negative historically, as from my experience with gaming discussion at least, it hasn't ever been this bad. In the past it would mostly be positive or neutral if something in a game or series wasn't done glaring bad in perception by enough people. Many times people who were overly critical would make a name for themselves purely because they were one of the few people being negative or critical about something.
I feel different with Pokemon, like after this the fanbase won't ever be the same especially since there will be lots of people who can't let go, it was one thing after another and I think I hit a point that I can peacefully bow out and play the old games.
Because I was expecting the worst when Home released it didn't bother me much, but its just sad to see TPC not respecting its playerbase, as they had promised that Home would feature more to do than just be a box to store your creatures, but I had noticed they did not really give details, if Home was really a solution to people upset at Dexit they would have been more willing to share examples of features. But here we are. Ah well, like you said there are plenty of other great games to play and talk about great experiences, I'm getting too old for this stress lol.
Cool, I was not a child and thus do not feel the need to have VA, If they add it at some point then cool, It's not on my checklist of requirements though
Great sales as expected. Unfortunately this probably also means that there is no reason for Game Freak to change their release schedule or reevaluate their design choices. Money talks.
SwSh felt so empty and rushed to me. I don't want to spend any more money on this franchise to be honest.
SwSh felt so empty and rushed to me. I don't want to spend any more money on this franchise to be honest.
Oh I didn't think you were attacking, I was just make sure my points were clear.
I definitely agree things have never been this bad. I've been on game forums since I was a teen in the hype leading up to the N64 launch in the mid to late 1990s. There were always trolls and hostile people, but the balance has gradually shifted way toward them over the years.
My take on it is social media, subReddits, Discord etc. have just siphoned off a lot of the normal and positive posters so traditional forums have gradually gotten more and more weighed down by the trolls and negative/hostile people who just want to give people grief and/or shout their opinions as abrasively as possible with no intention of given credence to others takes on things. It's a zero sum game where their opinion is the right one, combined with a tendency to discuss everything in hyperbole as being either some amazing, life changing experience or garbage. Traditional forums also seem to attract a ton of people with severe mental illness--I've never seen the amount of posts about depression and other issues that we see these days and it's another thing that seemed to gradually uptick in frequency over the time I've been online. I of course empathize with people who are struggling, but when people have issues it can lead to lashing out at others, extremely emotional expressions of opinions about banal (in the grand scheme of life) things like games and movies and contribute to a negative atmosphere in online communties.
Add in how much more polarized and tribal society as a whole has become given the state of politics around the world, and how gaming got hit directly with Gamergate which added that hostility to online communities on top of all the fanboy warring that was always there and it's no surprise people who just have fun playing and discussing games (or watching and discussing movies or whatever) have either just left online communities, or limit themselves to smaller ones that are more curated like game-specific subReddits or Discord servers etc.
For me, I have no interest in making online friends as a 40-something, so those smaller, more intimate communities don't appeal much to me (aside from real life friends and we just have a group thread in Signal to chat games etc.). Thus I just limit myself to here and occasionally game subReddits and have gotten very choosy about what threads I click on and even more so about what I post.
i mean i don't really care for VA in pokemon but since then we've had a ton of nintendo games with top notch VA.
16 million LTD has more or less been the standard for the series since gen 3, with very little deviation beyond a small spike in gen 4. Even if it absolutely craters from here on, third biggest gen is a lock. Passing gen 2 for second place is highly plausible.
Switch bumps all
Switch bumps all
Never heard of. This is insane - and I write this fully aware of how the word "insane" has been overly used in the past. But never more appropriate for this occasion.
Wow.
Wow.
Lmao at people thinking that you can vote with your wallet against Pokemon. You'll always lose.
I totally get this, because I got SwSh and I liked it. At the same time, I'm playing DQX1S (a game with as many original monsters as SwSh!), and it is impossible not to feel like things could've been better. There's no objective reason why SwSh isn't as good with as much polish. So I liked SwSh, but I still have eyes and a sense of quality.
I think if you count up everyone in that group, there's a lot of "disappointed" Pokemon fans and you'd imagine that GF would like to keep them. At the same time, it's hard to ignore what looks like strong evidence that tens of millions of ppl like their grilled cheese sandwiches and they don't need brie and avocado to spruce things up.
I imagine the "objective" reason is that DQXIS started development in 2013. I realize this kind of thing doesn't really matter from the customer perspective though since they're being asked to spend the same amount of money.
DQ11 started development in 2013 and first released in mid 2017 on the PS4 (so ~4 years). Pokemon SwSh started development in 2016 and released in 2019 (so ~3 years). It's obviously not 1:1, but I doubt the gap in content would have been bridged with another year of development. I doubt it would even if we consider SwSh + the DLC as a singular product
But like someone else said - how is that explanation consistent with the dynamax feature?It's more due to size of things on handheld. It's an odd one
All models are properly scale as standard.
Let's Go was a game they said was designed around Home Console and is closer to scale than before, but SWSH they said is focused on portable which is why they're back to how they were
How did they lose exactly?
I never had any illusions Pokémon SwSh wouldn't sell gangbusters. I never predicate my decision to buy something based on how many people indulge in it.
I saved $60 on a game I wouldn't enjoy nearly as much as it's predecessors.
I had the chance to borrow a copy from a friend (so idk if that also counts as a 'sold' version) and I played the main game and had no real incentive to play the rest of it. I would of been having mad 'Buyers Regret' if I actually bought it at full price.
Not even two weeks ago I put that $60 on the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon remake.
Just because I'm a fan doesn't mean I can't be critical about it. sales does not equal quality. Otherwise we wouldn't constantly be claiming FIFA, CoD, and Assasins Creed games are 'bad'.
It's not. The inconsistency made no sense to me when the game came out. My guess is the scaling isn't "for handhelds" as if often the excuse/reason given, and is more to ease the workload when coding the hitboxes and animations/effects. Rather than have every pokemon represented by it's actual size and have to adjust animations for those several hundred differently sized models, they group all pokemon into a much smaller subset of "sizes" (some are slightly scaled up, some scaled down) and then the animations and effects only have to be tweaked for that number
Yeah. It's my one major complaint with the game. But as other users have mentioned in the thread, the linearity was probably a result of the wild area's inclusion, and the wild area's inclusion definitely feels like a testbed for future region design.
It'd hurt more if I knew every main series game from here on out would be as streamlined as Sw/Sh, but I think the DLC's will be more indicative of the franchises future direction
You latter statement there is the reason. They make more profit by spending less revamping and adding things, putting more Pokemon in etc. given they sold gangbusters without spending the money on that (and eating into profit margins).
These huge franchise games that sell 10 million plus with most every installment are going to rarely go all out in trying to make the best games possible, much less cater to the desires of the hardcore niche of the fanbase. They make more profit just putting out things with relatively minor changes and upgrades to keep development costs down.
Sports games are the best example of this. There's not much incentive to really pump a ton of money into improving NBA2K or Fifa or Madden when they sell a shitton every year even when there's little more new than roster updates and a few minor tweaks and new features. Doing a big revamp/improvement wouldn't sell enough additional copies to make back the money spent on the changes.
For me personally, no. But I've always preferred linear games and don't really enjoy sandbox games or open world games that don't have an obvious linear path you can choose to follow.
I figure Pokemon will always skew linear as it's aimed at kids first, and also has a ton of casual appeal (especially after Go) so they're going to streamline things so anyone can finish it and not get frustrated at not knowing what to do/where to go next. That said, I do think there is more they can do to balance it and try and please both camps. But as I said in my response above, there's probably not a profit incentive to do so as it sells gang busters sticking to their basic, linear forumula. Until that changes, they have no reason to risk eating into profits if they invest and change it up and end up having it sell less (or the same which still means less profit if development cost is increased).
Amazing! That's an indicative the fan base is growing since the sales have been consistent during the gba, ds and 3DS era, Outside of 1st gen, Sw&Sh could be the peak of Pokemon video game sales.
I should've said there's no objective reason a Pokemon game couldn't (not isn't) be that good. When DQX1 first released, it didn't have voice acting and a lot of tweaks included in the Switch version, and those tweaks take a lot of time. No game can be 1:1 compared with another, but even the July 2017 release of DQX1 was ahead of SwSh on so many fronts.
there aren't any hitboxes since this is a turnbased game. there might be an empty actor parented to the pokemon that acts as the target but that's scale-independent
I think the only reason the games lack scale is because they're still sitting on a foundation that never accounted for it. it's probably why attack animations don't play out when you're fighting dynamax pokemon.
the whole "because it's on a handheld" argument was always a bullshit one that made zero sense
WOOF, congrats to GameFreak for this insanely massive success. Despite my greivances with Sword and Shield, I still enjoyed it more than the past two gens, so here's hoping things only go up from here. (But please please PLEASE bring Exp Sharing toggle back. That actually wasn't very fun to play around =/)
Some of these comments are truly unhinged. NatDexers inability to just admit that their boycott was unsuccessful and that they are clearly just a vocal minority.
A game wouldn't sell more units in 1.5 months than any other game in the franchise for the last 20 years if you were anything but a vocal minority.
I am also exhausted by this argument that Pokemon is never updated, improved upon, or that the devs don't listen to our feedback. As someone who has been playing since Blue it is an absolutely absurd thing to say with a straight face. I have noticed that people's nostalgia googles hinge on how old they were when they played their first Pokemon game. Some of y'all swear that Ruby and Sapphire or Diamond and Pearl are the best generations and it's a head-scratcher for me.
I got the game, I had a lot of fun with it. There are plenty of things that I think missed the mark, primarily the frame rate drops in the Wild Area and how absolutely broken the online functionality. Overall I still had enough fun to sink 125+ hours into it and I plan on getting the DLC.
A game wouldn't sell more units in 1.5 months than any other game in the franchise for the last 20 years if you were anything but a vocal minority.
I am also exhausted by this argument that Pokemon is never updated, improved upon, or that the devs don't listen to our feedback. As someone who has been playing since Blue it is an absolutely absurd thing to say with a straight face. I have noticed that people's nostalgia googles hinge on how old they were when they played their first Pokemon game. Some of y'all swear that Ruby and Sapphire or Diamond and Pearl are the best generations and it's a head-scratcher for me.
I got the game, I had a lot of fun with it. There are plenty of things that I think missed the mark, primarily the frame rate drops in the Wild Area and how absolutely broken the online functionality. Overall I still had enough fun to sink 125+ hours into it and I plan on getting the DLC.
You're confusing criticism with boycott.
I hated the dex exclusions, but I never doubted it would sell a ton and bought it myself because I love the franchise (and obviously want it to improve).
Indeed, especially since the Pokedex lacks a size comparison feature. It's funny that with mods you can get Pokemon to spawn and they're usually in the size of the non small battle model. I'd be fine with this and yet it's still smaller than its Dynamax'd form.
A few points, I also have plenty of critiques of the game as stated above.
But more importantly, my comments weren't directed at anyone with good faith critiques, but what has become the truly feral NatDex movement which is having a meltdown over these numbers. Because this game didn't just sell, it sold more units in almost two months than any other game in the franchise LTD did in 20 YEARS. And that's at double the price point. They're refusal to digest that a campaign which might have been started in good faith, but quickly devolved into a campaign of harassment against a company, their developers, and anyone willing to defend them, had truly zero impact. They are on the losing side and they refuse to just eat crow.
This game isn't just successful, it's on another level.
It doesn't mean it's not a dissapointment or doesn't have a ton of things that should be better. Just because something is a success doesn't mean the criticism it gets is wrong. They dropped the ball with the game and now it seems like they went give a shit about the issues
Impressive numbers. I hadn't played Pokémon before I bought this and sadly I discovered that it was quite mediocre. Not sure if I'll ever dive into this series again, it seems like it's a bit too simple and conservative for my taste.
Hitboxes might be the wrong word, but they're still models. Some box defines the model's bounds in 3D space as is checked for moves that involve contact (or animations that stop at the opponent) or even for anchor points for the pokemon's attacks. They don't need to be as precise as more "involved games (ie. fighting/action games), but they're still there. But who knows. It's definitely not the handheld argument
I literally listed some of my critiques of the game in my post. How are you interpreting me as the criticism police when I laid out critiques myself?
bounding box might be the phrase you're looking for. collision box but that would still be a hitbox. in any case, pokemon is more positioning driven. as in attacks are aimed at a space rather than the pokemon in it. that could be why the pokemon are scaled the way they are, in order for all the attacks to hit the mons in a believable manner
Holy shit this game is on another fucking level. People were really ready for the next gen jump.
While I don't know how this compares to previous games, it's personally shocking that they sold 16 million in what...1.5 months?! Amazing.
I bought Shield so I'm one of them. I'm a very casual Pokémon player so the game has been fine for me but yeah there are things that could have been done better.
Hopefully TPC will learn from SwSh to make future games even better :) but as is, I'm happy with my purchase and glad to see huge success for them.
I also understand why people are upset and that's completely valid also. I would have been happier to have all the pokemanz but I play so casual that I'll never even catch what's in the games now so it was less an issue for me. And I'm not carrying forward stuff from previous games (that would hurt losing the option).
Anyways, congrats TPC
I bought Shield so I'm one of them. I'm a very casual Pokémon player so the game has been fine for me but yeah there are things that could have been done better.
Hopefully TPC will learn from SwSh to make future games even better :) but as is, I'm happy with my purchase and glad to see huge success for them.
I also understand why people are upset and that's completely valid also. I would have been happier to have all the pokemanz but I play so casual that I'll never even catch what's in the games now so it was less an issue for me. And I'm not carrying forward stuff from previous games (that would hurt losing the option).
Anyways, congrats TPC
You were also saying the the people boycotting and having issues were a minority. Im saying that people can still have tons of issues with the game even if we own it. I'm hoping gamefreak in future releases steps it up because if this is a new standard then that's just a dissapointment. The one good thing is it looks like the third edition is dlc and not a full release.
Well you can try but the problem with that is that the people with bigger wallets gets more votes.
Turns out these people like Pokemon.
Nah, more like salt and outrage rarely win.
For one the national dex was already gone back on Sun/Moon, but people began complaining when the Pokémon became unavailable which wasn't an effect of the national dex being gone, so Dexit was basically was a headless chicken kind of boycott.
I love playing Shield and I still think online is a huge problem. Things like people on your friend lists not showing up in the Wild Area so you camp with them, etc. But I also am happy they're replacing the third version with DLC. Never liked them.
Too bad sales don't translate to quality.
Because a game that has a feature that makes your Pokémon huge clearly cares a lot about keeping sizes consistent for visibility.It's more due to size of things on handheld. It's an odd one
All models are properly scale as standard.
Let's Go was a game they said was designed around Home Console and is closer to scale than before, but SWSH they said is focused on portable which is why they're back to how they were
The anime had the games as the source material not the other way around.