Game Freak doesn't have, and never will have, any reason to upgrade their games. They hit a goldmine with RBY, only that the goldmine will never run out of gold. I didn't buy SwSh nor am I planning to, but even with all the controversy over Dexit, it sold 20 million copies. There are many (and by many, I mean maaaaaaaaaaaaany) games that are exponentially better than any Pokemon game ever made and come out a lower price but have sales way less than that. Pokemon is already selling way too good for them to even consider change.
I think what Game Freak realized is that the upgrades in technology from 2D to 3D and from SD to HD, and possibly newer ones in the future (AR/VR? Certainly seems like that kind of tech is knocking on the door of mainstream gaming) requires more and more resources to the point where they couldn't even produce a game at all if they keep their development practices the way they are. They could continue to reap bucketloads of money, but only if they actually have a game to bring to market, if it gets that bad they will most certainly go out of business.
Simple point, the majority of people don't buy Pokemon with the intention to play a game with well crafted RPG mechanics, innovative gameplay and a deep storyline since it'll be **** if you go in looking for those. They play it for Pokémon, since it can't be found anywhere else. Same reason for why the sales are so high despite the mediocre game. There isn't any alternative to Pokémon. You can't get it anyway else. People love the idea of Pokemon. TPC just makes so much money of merchandise that great sales look like small numbers in comparison. Game Freak gets 32 % of that and is more than happy.
I fear the same will be the case for Legends Arceus. Game Freak is tackling something they have no experience in and open world is so overdone at this point. People will still buy it because Pokemon.
The problem with going open world is that there is no mercy if you screw it up. The 'Open World RPG' genre is bloated way too much. The classic Pokemon experience prevented such backlash as you couldn't get that anywhere. Your go open world RPG route and you just shot yourselves in the foot when you have a thousand other games to compare to.
Which is why they're rightfully getting called out for the games' lack of quality. And eventually that could affect the sales if the word of mouth gets so bad that it eventually reaches the casuals.
Comparing Pokemon to FF6 or pretty much any other open world game is comparing apples to oranges. You might as well compare it to World of Warcraft, or Call of Duty. That's sort of the point I'm trying to get at is there's a reason why Pokemon games are only ever compared to other Pokemon games. You seemingly acknowledge this... but then you also seemingly go ahead and contradict your own acknowledgement with the above quotes.
We can argue about whether or not Pokemon games are good or bad compared to other games until the cows come home but the fact of the matter is there really isn't an objective metric we can measure with, so the whole discussion is kind of pointless. It's mostly subjective.
No, that's the way capitalism works. Even if apples and oranges are different things, they're both fruits. So someone who wants to buy a fruit and they only have the money for one, they're going to have to choose between one of the two and they are in fact in competition with each other even if they're not in
direct competition with each other. And if one of them is especially juicy while the other is rotten, which do you think people are going to choose? You can't just say "Oh well this is a different genre, so we can't compare them", no, you can't compare them directly with every single feature but we can compare the features they have in common. And in this case, we can compare Pokemon's world design and exploration with the world design and exploration of other adventure games such as BotW and Mario Odyssey. Hell, those two games aren't even the same genre either and they're often compared to each other (and just about everything on the Switch), BotW is an action-adventure game and Mario Odyssey is a platformer, but they're compared because they're both adventure games that highly value exploration and experimentation. And that's something Pokemon can (and really should) value as well given its core premise of going out into the world to catch and train Pokemon
