Many fans have raised concerns about the quality of the recent Pokemon games due to the Pokemon Company attempting to maintain a constant schedule and it seems the developers are noticing this. Takato Utsunomiya, the chief operating officer of The Pokemon Company has revealed that conversations are being had about how to keep up the series’ regular releases of games while also maintaining quality.
The issues came to a head last year with Pokemon Scarlet and Violet which were full of performance issues and glitches and are still not fully fixed. Game Freak and The Pokemon Company have tried to main a release of a game per year, although Scarlet and Violet getting 2 rounds of DLC this year makes 2023 an exception. Still, many feel the schedule is now hurting the games due to a focus on quantity over quality.
While Pokemon Scarlet and Pokemon Violet were well received from a gameplay standpoint, things came to a head last year when some fans expressed disappointment from a technical level. Performance and glitches were a problem in particular. Months later, things still aren’t at where some players had wanted.
At the Pokemon World Championships Utsunomiya stated the following:
“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. 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.”
Hopefully, they find an answer that will make everyone happy.
