The Pokemon Company considering a shakeup to game release schedule

The Pokemon Company’s COO revealed that internal talks are being held over their games’ quality and release schedules. The series’ rigid time-frames could see changes in the future.

The Pokemon World Championships 2023 TCG tournament has just wound down and the winning deck is in the wild.

ComicBook.com snagged some time with Pokemon Company COO Takato Utsonoyima at the event and gleaned some interesting info.

In a brief interview, Utsonoyima mentioned that the release rate and quality of upcoming Pokemon games were a major priority for the company presently.

Anyone who has played the most recent mainline entries in the series knows that they stretched the credulity of Nintendo’s Seal of Quality. Pokemon Scarlet & Violet launched with such major performance issues, Nintendo eventually offered refunds to players.

Bugs and glitches are still present in the games today and they’ve prompted fans to question the future of the franchise. When ComicBook.com broached these issues with Utsonoyima, his response was interesting.

“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 cadence,” he said. “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, really, quality products are also being introduced,” Utsonoyima finished.

Utsonoyima’s comments about how things have been done “up until now” raise some questions about whether changes may be made in the future. The franchise’s move to open worlds on HD hardware has drastically altered the development of Pokemon games.

It’s plausible that the Pokemon Company could benefit from allowing Gamefreak much more time to polish their titles on the Switch and its successor. While Pokemon Scarlet & Violet were the most successful Nintendo launches in history, there’s no telling how long fans will maintain their goodwill towards the franchise.