The Pokemon Company is having “more and more conversations” about how it can continue to deliver quality Pokémon games as part of its regular release schedule.
Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet were met with negative feedback from critics and the community alike for their technical shortcomings at launch, but have since sold more than 22.66 million copies worldwide.
It has raised concerns within the community that, with the move to the need to create high-definition games for Nintendo Switch, Game Freak is not being given enough time to spend on development – leading to the issues that were prevalent in the games early on.
When ComicBook asked about whether the Pokémon brand had to keep to a strict schedule when it came to regularly releasing new games, The Pokémon Company chief operating officer Takato Utsunomiya responded:
“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.”
Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet’s The Hidden Treasures of Area Zero Part 1: The Teal Mask will release on 13 September 2023, with Part 2: The Indigo Disk scheduled for release in Winter 2023.
