What happened to Pokémon the last years? >Main games not

Game Freak doesn't care about older audiences.

>>32228684
Srsly, what happened to the all the spin offs, the last one was PSMD in 2015.

>>32228716
No, the last one was Pokkén.

>>32228725
>good

>>32228736
Pokkén is pretty good, yeah.

>>32228684
>Event Pokémon are given via shitty codes that force you to go to a fucking store EVERY SINGLE TIME
I actually don't mind this to some degree, because 15 years ago I had absolutely no hope of getting any of these event pokemon without cheating. I'm still salty about the number of region-exclusive events that occur though, given there's absolutely no reason for it in today's age.

As for your original question OP, I don't really know. I don't think Pokemon is as big today as it used to be at the height of its popularity. The free to play shit is part of a general trend with Nintendo slowly moving onto the mobile market, backed by the initial burst of success Pokemon Go saw. The anime has always been trash as far as I'm concerned so I've nothing to say about that. The lack of good spin-off games really does hurt, Pokemon used to have quite a lot of them.

Imo, GF used to put emphasis on the in game gameplay of their products while somewhat ignoring the competitive scene, but I think now the balance has swung too far to the latter. i also disagree with their general practices more and more, for example to get people motivated to connect online, rather than present fun game activities and rewards to draw people to the online world, they take past resources like mega stones and hold them hostage. This on top of leaving out features for the third version as a standard leaves a bad taste for me.

>>32228684
Technology keeps advancing and gamefreaks incompetence as a game dev is becoming more apparent as the standard rises. The only constant is their waifu design and music,both are usually pretty good.