Did I blink?
I suppose it should be something of a public service announcement to say it out loud if you've not read it before, but owners of the latest generation of Pokémon games should immediately put down the controller and leave the game dormant for the foreseeable future whilst Nintendo try to solve a problem that is hard-corrupting saves. Yes, apparently the most recent update to the game in order to add a 'please pre-order the DLC' button to all of the ingame menus, carried with it a 'worst case scenario bug' which is effecting a bunch of people with sporadically different triggers. I've been lucky enough to avoid it by now but I'm not going to risk picking it back for nobody. Then again, the saying does go "Unlucky in love, lucky in cards", so knowing my luck I'd probably be fine going on a straight 24 hour bender until the next update drops. Although I've heard something quite curious from those unlucky souls out there who did land on 'snake eyes' with their save files. They bemoan the loss of countless hours of work they put into getting all the Pokémon and shinies in their deck.
Work is the word they use, not 'playtime', not 'amateur zoologist try-outs'; these people consider the collation of the Pokédex they want, the collection of the tournament-fit fighters that they need or the collection of shinies they desire, as being akin to work. And to their small credit, for most of these people that is actually a totally reasonable equation to make. Some of these people are talking losing Sixty shines with their corrupted saves! SIXTY! Bear in mind that Pokémon Home isn't open to Scarlet and Violet yet, meaning all of those shines had to have been caught in bred in the few months since these games came out. And also bear in mind, that Scarlet and Violet gutted the ability to effectively breed on the hunt for shinies. (I can only assume that such a man has possess no job or hobbies or family or even legs, and thus only play Pokémon all day.) But that verbiage there; of playing a game so often it's pretty much akin to a second job- there's only genre of game that really evokes those sorts of feelings that I can think of.
Live Services have since the very beginning of their existence been an investment as much in your time as your money. They are titles usually put together with less content than you'd hope for out of your typical fully finished video game, but stretched out so painfully thin through level-gating, intentionally grindy level curves and overly big boss bars to make that small pool of content last long enough for the devs to cook up some new content and slip it out the door before the community is done and dusted with the original lot of stories and missions. A philosophy likely borne to mimic the MMO cycle, but to a much easier to replicate degree. These are games that require daily commitments for grinding to get the things that you want, to roll the die for the right weapon drops, grind out enough currency to spend at the premium shop or simply unlock the newest level cap before the next update shoots that cap into the stratosphere. Does any of that sound familiar?
All of the Pokémon games have been time investments in order to reach the feasible 'completion' point of the game and collect all the available monsters listed within the Pokédex. But I have to admit that recently there really has been a trend towards stretching out content to last longer and this most recent generation in particular has even had it's hand at Live Service-style adding of content. I've already mentioned how the egg system has been gutted, but EV training is just as painful with there being no decent way to grind berries. So Tournament building is unnecessarily bloated. (Sword and Shield, with the Isle of Armor, is still the best game for building Tournament ready Pokémon in.) And the main quest of Scarlet and Violet does stretch on for an inordinate amount of time for a Pokémon game; almost in the manner that a Live Service game might with it's storylines. But I think the biggest smoking gun comes from the new raid system.
Itself an evolution on Sword and Shield's Dynamax raids; Scarlet and Violet offers a collaborative dungeon system where players can meet up over the internet to fight giant powerful Pokémon and be rewarded with a chance to catch that Pokémon after the fact. There's less 'collector' reasons to do so now because this generation's gimmick is kind of visually underwhelming compared to last generation's, but the special promoted dens that Gamefreak cycles in and out do provide some fantastically built Pokémon to snatch up. But recently Gamefreak went that one step further, by debuting two version exclusive brand spanking new Legendary Paradox Pokémon that can only be caught in these raids. Essentially a lightning bolt call to action summoning fans back to the game as any Live Service might by debuting a new raid or dungeon. (You know, just with considerably less effort on the developer's side, because this is Gamefreak we're talking about here.)
The typical cycle of a Live Service game revolves around these calls to action that summons the audience back to their stables, because through this electricity bump the developers and publishers can ensure player retention and increase player's conviction and devotion to the game. The more players become devoted, the more they're likely to spend on some of the microtransactions to keep the game going. Now, Pokémon has yet to introduce any form of microtransactions (Thank god) however we can see a similarity in that basic approach to recurrent customers if we take the scope of the model and expand it out to a franchise-wide view. From here, it's very clear that Pokémon games have actually been on the Live Service train of development for quite a while now, perhaps ever since the very first sequel before even the concept of the Live Service wyrm was a glint in it's mother's postman's eye.
Pokémon games have always boasted about their 'Poke Bank' service which allows monsters to be transferred from game to game, essentially tying the progression of each game into one continuous train regardless of narrative consistency. This alone provides a throughline from which the developers can pull players time and time again to the 'action' of buying the latest Pokémon game in order to interact with their favourite monsters. Adding new Pokémon with each generation simply encourages achievers to work on building their collection, killer archetype players will want to maintain their best Pokémon against the growing competitive meta with ever increasing rooster, explorer players will build attachments to the memories of their longest held Pokémon, and socialisers are being catered to with Gamefreak's relatively recent venture into online community features. (Although that is very much still work-in-progress.)
So to answer the question: When did Pokémon become a Live Service? I guess it kind of always was, only the franchise has leant into it's own unique take on the genre which celebrates it's own mechanics and strengths; which is one of the directions that the Live Service genre is sorely lacking in. Perhaps when Gamefreak have run out of ideas, or pushed their creativity to the limits of Nintendo's current hardware, they'll fall into the lowest common denominator and find some way to throw in 'Loot systems' with rarity tables and all that cookie-cutter heartless feature-systems that all the rest of these games automatically chuck into the cauldron without a single critical thought- but until then this franchise stands a beacon that even in this most whittled down and gutted of genres, there can be some creative individualism. Maybe that is why Pokémon has remained itself a giant of the industry for so very long. (Because it can't be the quality of the games, god knows that.)
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