Pokemon: The Next Ten Years (and beyond...)

[bestgaragedoors]

We seem to enjoy having conversations about the direction in which the Pokemon franchise is heading on Discord, so I thought it might be a good idea to discuss our thoughts on the future of Pokemon here. It is easier to write in depth, post links, and all that fun stuff. So, here's the question: what do you think will happen to Pokemon in the next ten years (or more, if you really want a long-term analysis)? What do you want to happen? How do you think the culture will react to Pokemon? And if we want to get a little meta - how have our previous predictions of Pokemon gone right - or wrong?

Here are some predictions of mine for Pokemon:
(1) The franchise will stay steady, seeing neither big spikes in popularity nor lows. The success of the two Switch mainline games show me that there is a big appetite for Pokemon across the general population yet. Pokemon merch is still omnipresent in children's departments.
(2) Gen I Pokemon will continue to be the most popular Pokemon. Fashion collabs, merchandise, will continue to focus on Pikachu, Bulbasaur, Squirtle, Charmander (maybe Charizard), and optionally Mewtwo or Gengar. These Pokemon have the advantage of covering a wide variety of colors (yellow, green, blue, orange/red, purple) which makes them fantastic for merch. I mention Gengar because I've noticed that fashion collabs sometimes use Gengar instead of Mewtwo as a 'purple' Pokemon. (Working on a full list of this...) I suspect that the Gen 1-centric nature of things like Let's Go series or initial release of Pokemon Go is not because of "nostalgia", but because the Pokemon marketing team really wants everyone to remember the Gen I Pokemon and like them. Gen I marks the peak of Pokemon's social saturation! I can't think of a single Pokemon from Gen 2 on that has succeeded in becoming instantly recognizable to the general public.
(3) Gamefreak will continue trying to expand on the formula that Pokemon Go introduced. By which I mean, that snappy quick encounter method where you can catch a Pokemon in the overworld and have to focus on aiming and hiding. The Let's Go and Legends series seem like attempts to seriously translate this gameplay to full-fledged games. The Legends games show that people really like this! I wouldn't be surprised if they worked on a way to introduce this to Gen X while keeping the turn-based battling mechanic.
(4) Gen 10 will not be paradigm-busting. It will be an iterative improvement on S/V. There will be more attempts to deepen the story, but gameplay will remain not too different from S/V.

Lemme know what you think!

 

[Tango]

I think your predictions look pretty sensible.

I haven't followed the franchise past generation 4 but I've heard that people think Nintendo could do a lot more and better than its been doing. The popularity made them not try very hard which allowed for something like Palworld to thrive. I have heard that Black and White were likely the high point of the series. (I stopped at Heart Gold) Also, the adventures manga series seemed to have the best offical story for it. I still like the anime too though even though there are things about it that bugged me. (I've only seen a bit past the orange islands.)

I'm not sure if the quality of the games will continue to decrease as time goes on or not. That makes me wonder what everyone thinks are the worst mainline games for Pokemon? My guess would be Sword and Shield, but I'm not sure since I haven't played them. (Just going off of some vague general background knowledge) I suppose someone could say Red and Blue were the worst since they were lacking many of the features of the future games, but I don't feel like it would be a fair comparison since none of the other games would exist without them. I also thought Red and Blue were fun, so I probably wouldn't nominate them as the worst, regardless.

Are there any veterans here who have played all the games to give their input on it? (I assume on TR there should be many)