Your move, Pokemon.

 

So perhaps you've noticed but over the month of January the world was briefly swept by something it almost never gets when we're talking about Nintendo products- Competition. I mean sure, Mario has Sonic to 'contend' with, but those are never actually fair competitions- those are just exhibitions for Mario to showcase how much more market dominance he has over the blue blur at that particular moment of time. They're really rather cruel if you think about it. But Pokemon on the other hand? Oh that right there is the product of a life born with literally no hardships whatsoever. You couldn't dream of a more privileged, silver spoon, space within which to flounder and collapse in on one-self. Every way in which Pokemon has let down it's fans over the years can be traced back to the iron fist that the Pokemon Company has enforced over the world, as spurred on by Nintendo's great wall of lawyer muscle.

Which is why it has been so surprising that Palworld has been allowed to go on as long as it has. Even former Pokemon employees seem flabbergasted by it, which either means the big N are riding up for an apocalyptic lawsuit so destructive it will burn up the entire game's industry- or they simply don't have the legal grounds that they thought they did. And if it is the latter- then that means Pokemon is going to have to face up to something terrifying that they've never had to face before- expectations. When you own the monopoly lion's share of the market for your game type, the onus rarely falls on you to really try when it comes to wooing over your customers. But set up a new stall on the front lawn that offers something more than you do, at a cheaper price? Well then you've just been captialismed on, son!

Of course, what this means for The Pokemon Company is that they actually have to step up their game if they want to wrest fans back from Palworld- because whilst these player counts are current a dent on Pokemon's giant empire- this is the seed from which the great oak grows. Palworld, assuming they aren't nuked in a lawsuit warhead, are going to grow off the back of this game. They're going to get more resources, feedback and staff aboard and they're going to take another shot at this genre in a couple years or so. And that game? That one might be a little bit better, and gain a little bit more traction. And at some point consumers are going to be asking themselves whether or not they want to shell out for Pokemon's latest failure experiment in basic game design principles that somehow managed to fail making open world exploration interesting even with decades of examples to learn from, and just pick up the cheaper option Palworld is providing.

 I suppose what I'm trying to manifest within the world is the possibility that Pokemon is going to need to react and change in order to keep their spot at the top of the roster, and we might be able to take a guess at the way they're going to do it by looking at the company we're dealing with and what they typically do in nervous moments. For example, I think the biggest ability currently residing in the Pokemon tool-kit is that of nostalgia. When weaponised, nostalgia baiting can subsidize a lot of your marketing budget simply by word of mouth that the thing people loved is coming back to them practically unchanged, remade on a slightly worse- but shinier- engine. And we already know this is a tool the Pokemon Company are obsessed with.

It's practically all but confirmed fact that the team are juggling a remake of Pokemon Gold and Silver adorned with mascot Pokemon and borrowing the exact same game design their ancestor teams worked on back in 1999. Yes, the 'Let's go' remakes are presumably going to come with the 'Pokemon Go' redesigns of the originals that 'Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee' enjoyed- and the Unova remakes which have also been leaked and will feature their own set of quality of life improvements- which to be clear are all utterly negligible. Basically the bare minimum to make it feel worthy of being called a new game whilst forgoing the risk of actually trying to make something new. Which at the very least gives GameFreak time to work on their next main entry game which promises so much and delivers so very little. It's easy to forget how little GameFreak actually deliver on until you've gone through their latest entry and reflect on how unfulfilling your experience just was.

But that doesn't mean The Pokemon Company are just going to write off making something new! Oh, they've got to try and win over the conversation somehow, which means they have to try and make their next Pokemon game a contender to Palworld. I think this confirms that the company aren't going to be pulling back on the open world elements like some figured they might following the performance hiccups of Scarlet and Violet, but they may just be spurred to try and make that open world experience more involved as Palworld does. So what does that mean? A return of the 'hideout' mechanic offering basic base building? Possible. Simple survival mechanics? Unlikely. A more comprehensive Pokemon populated worldspace which better champions explorative play? I hope so.

Because you see- that is what is so great about this coming fight! Challenge breeds competition and competition breeds improvements! If they can't cheat their way to market dominance the way that Pokemon have relied on doing all these years, then they have to start getting out of their comfort zones and doing things they would never normally do. Maybe that means being a bit less anal about the way they handle cross-marketing between their products, maybe a bit less regional locking of content- and maybe we can start to see Gamefreak actually grow as a company in a way that a developer who has been making games for over two decades really should have by now. Why don't they have an international office at this point?

Now to be honest with you I don't think that Palworld is the prophesised Pokemon killer of yore. It wears the boots and talks the talk, but it's stride is clumsy and it's vision lazy. But who's to say that someone else can't follow Palworld's initiative with an even better realisation of the Pokemon idea? I've said it before, but I think these Pokemon-style games are currently in an invisible arms race to see who can be the first to create a game which depicts a 'Ryme City' style world as teased in Detective Pikachu. Nail that and you've become the king of the genre, in my humble opinion. And if that winner isn't The Pokemon Company- I ain't gonna be whining.