The Pokemon Company chief operating officer Takato Utsunomiya has stated that the company is having conversations about the release schedules for future Pokemon games and raising the general quality of the games.
Speaking to ComicBook.com, Utsunomiya stated that there have been conversations about changing the cadence of game releases as development environments change.
“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,” Utsunomiya said through a translator. “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.”
For context, new Pokemon games have been coming out on a regular, almost yearly basis since the franchise first made its debut on the Game Boy back in 1996. Since then, the franchise has gone through several generations of platforms, focusing mainly on handheld systems for its mainline releases. The release of the Nintendo Switch was the first time mainline Pokemon games were released on a platform that could be considered a home console.
More recent Pokemon games have seen quite a few complaints by players owing to performance issues and lacklustre visuals. Despite these complaints, however, new mainline Pokemon games almost always top sales charts all over the world.
The most recent release, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, is currently gearing up for the release of its The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero expansion, which will be bringing over 230 Pokemon to the game. The expansion will be released in two parts, with the first arriving on September 13 and the second slated for a Winter release.