Whatever Happened to Pokemon Z?
Fans of Nintendo’s Pokemon series were very excited when Pokemon X and Y were released because they thought that Pokemon Z would show up within a year. In fact, that seems to be what Nintendo typically did. They had a tendency to release games in threes, usually about a year or a year-and-a-half apart. This was especially true of the more successful series of games, which by all accounts, Pokemon appeared to be. With that being said, a lot of people ended up feeling disappointed when 2016 came and went and there was no Pokemon Z. And even today, two years later, there is still not a Pokemon Z ad had been expected. The question is, what happened?
In reality, there are a couple of different things that caused this to happen. First and foremost, Nintendo decided that they weren’t really making enough money off of the series and they needed to do something to address the issue. As a result, they chose to go with an entirely new generation of the game as opposed to continuing the line that had already been released. Supposedly, research had shown that whenever they released an entirely new generation of the game, they had more sales. Therefore, they thought they would be getting more money by completely changing course as opposed to doing what they had done in the past. In other words, most of it was all about how much money the company could make.
It’s important to note that there was also at least one other factor that figured into this decision. Nintendo made the decision not to release Pokemon Z for the same game system that they had used as the platform for Pokemon X and Y because they were rolling out a new handheld game system and wanted to save Pokemon Z for that particular system. Did this make dedicated fans of the original games happy? The answer was a resounding no. Fans were highly disappointed that these decisions were made, yet they felt rather powerless to do much of anything about it.
Unfortunately, as is so often the case these days, plans changed right in the middle of everything and it was all to bring in more money. That seems to be the overwhelming outcome associated with a lot of things. The truth is, a lot of fans are so unhappy about it that the decision could potentially end up costing Nintendo money in the long run. People have a tendency to come to expect certain things and when those decisions fall through, a lot of people make the decision to move on to a competitor instead of continuing to throw their money at the very company that made them so unhappy.
Obviously, nobody really knows how all of this will affect Nintendo in the long run. Much of it depends on a matter of personal perspective. In other words, the fans that are very upset about the decision typically feel like it could have financial repercussions for Nintendo later on down the road. On the other hand, people that weren’t so fond of this particular series of games usually don’t think that it’s really going to matter one way or the other. When it’s all said and done, only time will tell whether or not Nintendo made the right decision.