- Joined
- Oct 29, 2013
- Messages
- 10
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- 11
1) Their audience is everyone, not just or primarily kids and pre-teens. The fact that they keep ignoring us doesn't mean they don't consider us their audience. Charizard has 100000 forms because they know there are fans of gen 1 who played the games in 1996 (what they don't know is that they made us hate Charizard). The problem of the games is that they try to appeal to everyone and fail pleasing anyone. Sword and Shield are mainly focused on competitiveness. TPC knows its audience has grown up people too.
Their general audience is everyone their primary audience is children first and foremost. Everything they produce is first and foremost geared towards children. You cannot tell me that their emphases aren't on children, For christ's sake, they made an entire mobile game dedicated to getting kids to brush their teeth. TPCi knows who buys their games, toys, apps, DVDs, etc. and it's children. They are their bread and butter and they'll cater to them first and foremost. Do they like the fact that the older fans are still dedicated and that they are also interested? Of course, they do. They'll throw bones to the older fans to thank them for their loyalty but older fans are in no way their priority and it'd be foolish to assume that we are their target demographic.
2) They literally said they would have never made DLC for Pokemon when they were actually working on the DLCs at that exact moment. In an interview, it was stated that the dlcs were not a result of the fans' requests because they were already working on them. Their words, not mine. And in any case, they could have simply said: "free update with more pokemon" which is what we got in the end. They just chose revolution over truth.
The interview with InsideGamer that you a referring to makes no mention of DLC whatsoever. Masuda says the following: “We currently have no plans to make the Pokemon that are missing from the Galar Pokedex available in-game. This is an approach that we want to continue within future Pokemon games. Up until now, it hasn’t been possible to encounter every Pokemon in every game, so people had to transfer them from old games to the new game, by using Pokemon Bank for example.”
Now it's understandable to extrapolate from that statement to mean that they had no plans about DLC but now knowing what we know the reason he said he what he said was to advertise Pokemon Home, maintain a surprise factor about the expansion pass, and not to give a false hope that EVERY single Pokemon would be returning. Also, the term revolution is definitely dramatic. Online outrage in the grand scheme of things meant absolutely nothing and Sword and Shield are already in the Top 3 of best selling mainline games in less than a year of being on the market on a console with a lower install base than the DS and the 3DS. There was hardly a "revolution" it was just a bunch of people in online echo chambers venting and criticizing that in the end had no tangible changes on anything.
3) The fans hyped themselves because TPC decided it was a good idea to hype them. It's a choice. With the choice comes the backlash. In the end, it was a bad choice otherwise their video wouldn't have become the most disliked pokemon and Nintendo video on youtube. Fact. If the past means something, they should have learned from when they announced the first switch title, and then they released let's go games. If you hype pokemon fans, they will have expectations. Simple as it is. Just don't always blame the fans for the marketing issues of a big company. If you make a trailer saying "explore the ultramegalopolis" and then the ultramegalopolis is a corridor, you cannot blame the angry fans. It's always the same old story: pokemon fans cannot have expectations, cannot be hyped, cannot have good graphics, etc because it's pokemon. Pokemon fans hype themselves easily, as a big company, they should have known/learned at this point how to manage them, if they don't --> they don't know their fans. They are the biggest franchise on the planet and the fact that in the last 3 years they kept messing up with marketing is just another fact.
TPCi only hyped up that it would be an announcement of a new project. That does not mean a new mainline game whatsoever and it is entirely on the fans for making that jump in logic. Time and time again the TPCi gives fans an inch and they take 10 miles in speculation. At some point, the fans need to stop overhyping every damn announcement and should try to temper their expectations. TPCi has not been screwing up their marketing because all their so-called "failures" have seen immense success financially because they succeeded with the people they wanted it to succeed with children. They know their fans very well. It is not us. To keep acting like that our wants should be kowtowed to and treated as equivalent to their primary demographic despite not bringing in the same amount of profit is hilariously foolish. The children of today are very satisfied with the product they are receiving and the numbers show it. While we may want more from the series we have to be reasonable and acknowledge that what we want may not be what children want and that it may not align with what TPCi and Gamefreak want to produce. The reason they are one of the biggest franchises on the planet is that they know exactly what they are doing and know where their attention should be pointed to. Pokemon fans online need to understand that what we want isn't a priority like it was 10-20 years ago. I've made my peace with it and I pick and choose what interests me and ignore what doesn't. Not throw an online bitchfit because I'm not catered to 24/7. I'm 21 my time was 10 years ago not now and that's perfectly fine. Pokemon Unite isn't what I wanted to see but I'm not gonna walk around and act as TPCi owes me a mainline game just because I'm a fan.
4) The fact that Tencent forced them to make their own presentation is probably true. It was TPC who announced it as a "big project" to the fans. "Next week we will announce a big mobile project" ---> revolution avoided if you know your fans and you know what to say to your fans clearly.
They know damn well what Pokemon fans like and want --> I disagree. What you are not counting is that Pokemon is slowly becoming a controversial and divisive brand on the Internet. From USUM till UNITE, every day there's someone new who is upset about something. If you are a big Company you know this is not good for the brand, it's like a snowball that becomes an avalanche. And pay attention, I'm not talking about the games and their quality which would need an entire deep analysis, what I'm saying is that they are forgetting how to talk to their fans. Pokemon fans may not care about Unite, maybe someone will. The problem here is that this game, alone, could have had a totally different destiny than the one it got because, in the end, it makes sense financially.
Two videos in a year with 90k dislikes or more (Unite has 150k+ right now, or 200k if we consider the 50k thousands that misteriously disappeared)---> you are not comunicating the right way your products.
TPCi is going to announce it as a big project because to them it probably is a big project. A full-fledged game that has connectivity between the Switch and Mobile devices is still relatively new territory. MOBAs are most certainly new territory for them and would definitely be considered a big project considering that Pokemon has never made such a huge jump in genres. Plus it's a collaboration with Tencent which is absolutely huge for any gaming company worth their salt. For all intents and purposes, this is a massively new direction that the franchise is taking, So yes I think it does constitute as a big project. Pokemon is communicating with their fans very well and their recent successes clearly paint that picture. Pokemon is becoming controversial in some gaming circles but to the overwhelming majority of people in this world, Pokemon is a brand that is still going strong. It's still a family-friendly brand that caters to their children and no amount of rage from 20+-year-olds is going to change that because once again. WE ARE NOT THEIR PRIORITY!! They aren't forgetting how to talk to their fans. They are talking to their younger fans just as they always have and will continue to do. So long as children serve to be the lifeblood of this franchise then TPCi will never have to change their approach. Why would they? It has seen them so much success across the decades. If it isn't broken don't fix it. Youtube dislikes are but one metric to gauge fan responses. TPCi probably has a multi-million dollar marketing and public relations teams that have far more information than you or I and probably know way better about how well they will do. Whatever fan backlash we see online is literally a drop in the ocean compared to the wide array of people that make up the fanbase worldwide.