The Pokemon Company is having “more conversations” about producing regular, but quality, releases
“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."
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The Pokemon Company is discussing how it can maintain its regular release schedule of Pokemon games while ensuring they are of good quality. This small detail was shared in an interview between the chief operating officer of The Pokemon Company - Takato Utsonoyima - and ComicBook.com during the Pokemon World Championships in Tokyo, Japan.
While the interview was said to focus on questions about Pokemon games or anime, ComicBook.com had asked Utsonoyima whether the Pokemon series of games had a specific schedule to uphold when releasing new titles.
Utsonoyima then detailed that, “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 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, really, quality products are also being introduced,” Utsonoyima concludes.
The latest mainline game to be delivered by the Pokemon Company is Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, and if you spent any time at all with the game, you’ll know that it was rampant with performance and quality issues. I wrote about the game a while back, declaring it a fantastic game that showed promise (it was even my GOTY for 2022, excluding Elden Ring), but it also made me very concerned for the future of the series.
My concern was regarding exactly how The Pokemon Company would be able to maintain its regular release schedule, without compromising the quality of its games, which had clearly happened with Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. You could even argue this was already happening with Pokemon Legends: Arceus, too, and ultimately, many a Pokemon fan doesn’t want to see this continue happening.
Takato Utsonoyima’s interview goes to show that this hasn’t gone unnoticed or ignored by The Pokemon Company, and hopefully we can expect to see higher quality Pokemon titles in future; maybe at the cost of the franchises regular release schedule, but only time will tell.