The Pokémon Company has shared that there are “more and more conversations” inside its offices over the viability of its current release schedule for the Pokémon series.
Recently, the Pokémon World Championships were hosted in Yokohama with a number of extra events to promote the games and the imminent The Hidden Treasure Of Area Zero expansion for Pokémon Scarlet & Violet.
In a group interview, chief operating officer Takato Utsunomiya was asked by Comic Book whether there was a schedule that The Pokémon Company uses to determine when the main and spin-off games should be released.
“I think in general, 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 a cadence, you might say,” he replied via a translator.
“Always having these products able to be introduced and new experiences for our customers, and that’s how we’ve operated up until now,” Utsunomiya explained. While the World Championships were happening over the weekend, announcements for Pokémon Go, Pokémon TCG and Pokémon Sleep were also revealed for fans.
“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 quality products are also being introduced,” he concluded.
In NME‘s three-star review of Pokémon Scarlet & Violet, technical issues like stuttering, frame rate dips and “more bugs than Viridian Forest” marred the experience. It could be possible that Utsunomiya was referring to the reception of the games when he mentioned that “quality” became a more pertinent point in these conversations.
In other gaming news, Far Cry 5 and Far Cry: New Dawn writer Drew Holmes has been promoted to IP director of the popular first-person shooter series.