It’s easy to see why there’s a dozen and more Pokémon clones coming out of the indie scene, because people want control back over their monster games, and not just have some giant company handle them to either make something about the same as before but perhaps outsourced, or just dump a bunch of random things on mobile. Somehow, teaming up with effectively Chinese EA/Activision is considered a good move because it means you get to genericise the brand further to make the billionth MOBA.
I’ve mentioned many times before how I despise the MOBA, where it’s at first confusing and at last dull. Yet this infectious genre keeps entering my life somehow. There was even the time where I just happened to stumble upon the major tournament for one by accident because I just happened to be in the area for unrelated reasons. Sure, it’s interesting to see how these nerds obsess over a game in person but I was definitely an outlier there. That’s eSports, it’s electronic sports, and I already barely get normal sports. Extreme sports I can at least understand a bit better.
Something to note is that just because a system has a touch screen and is less powerful than the super 4K consoles doesn’t mean that it’s a dumping ground for phone garbage. I do get the feeling that The Pokémon Company is banking on Nintendo dropping out of the console market, so they’re just eager to follow the money elsewhere instead of making a new entry on other gaming platforms and having to negotiate how to get multiplayer to work there, where cross-play has been more difficult to achieve. If the next “mainline” game ends up being a phone thing, yet somehow still split into two versions, then that’s just going to make no sense. Sure, if the version split was between the two main phone OS types, that may be a bit creative, but it’s still an artifact of a prior time. An artifact made more apparent by how they had to have two versions of the DLC because they had two versions of the Switch game.