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The Pokémon Company boss discusses quality of games with such regular releases

2023-08-14 20:16
The Pokémon Company admits it may well have to change the way it works to have constant releases that are high quality.
The Pokémon Company boss discusses quality of games with such regular releases

The Pokémon Company is continually discussing how it can continue to release games often whilst still "ensuring really quality products".

'Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl', 'Legends Arceus' and Scarlet and Violet' have all been released within 12 months, and there have been some technical challenges along the way, with many players suggesting it might be better for the firm to cut back on the number of releases in favour of better quality play.

Asked about this by ComicBook.com at the Pokémon World Championships in Yokohama, Japan, The Pokémon Company's 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."

Meanwhile, 'Pokemon Go's maker recently axed a quarter of its staff.

Niantic - whose augmented reality game smashed download records in Apple’s App Store when it was released in 2016 - is feeling the effect of the video games sector’s sluggish performance and reacted to the conditions by letting 230 people go, canning two games in development and shutting its Los Angeles-based studio.

CEO John Hanke said: "We have allowed our expenses to grow faster than revenue.

"The top priority is to keep Pokemon Go healthy and growing as a forever game.

He went on to say that since the mobile game’s debut "the mobile market has become crowded and changes to the app store and the mobile advertising landscape have made it increasingly hard to launch new mobile games at scale."

Along with making roughly 25 per cent of its workforce jobless, Ninatic also ceased the ‘NBA All-World’ game and halted work on its ‘Marvel World of Heroes’ game.

When it launched, ‘Pokemon Go’ became an international sensation as players were able to go into the world to ‘catch’ Pokemon in certain locations in the real world, but it was condemned when people got themselves into all sorts of trouble like trespassing and causing car crashes to snatch up all the offerings.

Last summer, Niantic announced another retrenchment strategy when it declared it was pulling the plug on four projects and getting rid of eight per cent of its staff.

At the time, a rep said: "We generally don't comment on third-party estimates of our revenue as they are often incorrect, which is the case here.”