Kind of why I mentioned twitter, because I'm pretty sure that IS a place where peoples voices ARE heard.
A place where people can shout what they want as loud as they want is not automatically tantamount to a place where people's voices are heard.
If you think that individual professionals in any field are taking excessive heed of what people are saying about them on Twitter, I don't know what to tell you. Particularly when the matter isn't something that can and/or should be changed, like poor customer service or business practices. No, we're not talking about anything relevant like that - we're talking about people being mad about a Pokémon based on ice cream. Mull that over.
....This makes no sense. Somebody getting a "free dominoes pizza" door hanger is something they never signed up for, which is why its trash to them. Twitter is something they sign up for, so they CAN communicate with their fans. That IS twitters purpose.(not that I'm denying many celebrities do it for promotional purposes)
See previous. I guarantee you a thousand times over Ken Sugimori - or Junichi Masuda, or your favorite pro athlete or music star - is not signing into Twitter daily and going "alright, let's see what well-thought out criticisms people have posted for me on this here Twitter today!"
I'm aware that my job is to respond to criticism and improve upon it.
You don't design for a seminal video game franchise. I'm not trying to downplay your experience as an artist, but doing fan work simply isn't the same as actually doing paid, professional work for a franchise like Pokémon. It isn't. Sorry.
but considering the excellent design of pokemon is what seperates it from other games, it sure as hell can attract a lot more buys.
You would have an exceedingly difficult time proving this in any tangible sense, i.e. there's no way for someone to say definitively "Generation V would have sold more units if Vanilluxe hadn't been included."
As mentioned, he leads the developement team and picks each and every pokemon, I'd say he could change the result quite easily if inclined to.
He certainly could. But I'll put it to you this way - as an artist, certainly you would agree that simply because something doesn't match your personal artistic sensibilities doesn't inherently make it bad, does it?