Why fans stay true to buggy tech

Two triple A games in three years, G? (Photo: Stormscribe)

Unlike many of my friends, I never played any of the Pokémon games growing up. It’s not that I had anything against the franchise, I was just engrossed in acing cooking recipes on Cooking Mama and solving murder mysteries in the Phoenix Wright games.

So when the video game franchise announced their two newest games—Pokémon Scarlet and Violet—to drop over the weekend, I didn’t give it much thought. My friends, on the other hand, lined up for almost two hours last Friday morning at the mall just to claim their pre-ordered video games.

I got to watch one of my friends play Pokémon Scarlet, and I swear, I’ve never seen someone in their late twenties look so giddy over a video game. I took to Twitter to understand what the hype was about, but instead found dozens of unhappy players complaining about glitches no one expected from installments already in its ninth generation.

Gotta develop 'em all

The release of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet has the highest pre-order sales of any Pokémon launch of all-time; they’re selling like crazy despite retailing at standard triple A game prices. 

So I don’t blame players who’ve waited so long for this release to expect a finished product, especially for a triple A game that still has bugs like models popping in and out at random or frame rate issues even during the simplest of animations. 

It’s no secret that the life cycle of the Nintendo Switch is roughly two generations of tech behind its console rivals at Xbox or Playstation, but aging hardware is only partially to blame for Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s bugs.

Many Pokémon players have concluded that the games’ developer Game Freak is to blame. Game Freak has been developing games for Pokémon since 1996, when it was still being played on the Gameboy (yeah, that long ago). 

It’s not their first game developed for the Nintendo Switch, either. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are currently their seventh and eight games made for the Nintendo Switch.

Despite their years of run-ins with Nintendo tech and Pokémon games, the developers at Game Freak have yet to figure out how to maximize the limited power of the Nintendo Switch for the open world elements of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. 

But there’s another side to the pixel drops and platform issues that many players don’t see.

Slowpokes win the race

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet announced its drop as early as February 27 this year. When a franchise as beloved as Pokémon publicizes new starters and finalizes the date for its release, loyal fans are bound to wait with bated breath (which they, in fact, did). Many tech experts know fair and well that the development cycle for new games isn’t enough to give the fans what they deserve. 

Gaming B2B Head Christopher Dring made a case for Game Freak. “Three years isn’t nearly enough time to build a big AAA adventure game,” said Dring. The expectations for Nintendo Switch games in the highly-competitive console market are far higher. People have even begun comparing Pokémon Scarlet and Violet to some of Nintendo’s big first-party titles, such as Zelda. 

If Game Freak’s work shows for anything, I believe that pressures to fulfill the promised November launch pushed the developers to their limits. 

Game Freak wanted to avoid disappointing fans and operational expenses that came with missing the release date, even at the cost of the developers’ workload. Developers probably had to crunch to make deadlines, which could have greatly affected the final product. 

So to compare the four-year development of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to the three-year development of two triple A Pokémon games seems like a battle between a level 100 Groudon and a level 1 Zigzagoon—an unfair fight with an obvious winner from the get-go.

Tech consumers: I choose you

What I found most disheartening for long-time Pokémon fans was that the product they patiently waited for was simply not what they deserved on a graphics level. But I don’t think that’ll stop my Pokémon-playing friends from anticipating the next installments to the nth generation.

The thing about tech consumers that are loyal to a video game—or any tech product for that matter—is that even when presented with tech products of higher quality, most of the time they will choose the products they have an affinity to.

Many products with loyal fanbases keep tech companies afloat yet complacent. The Call of Duty franchise, for example, made over $1 billion in sales following the two-week release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. And yet disgruntled players still have to deal with game mechanics that can crash their game.

It’s not just video games. It extends to most tech products. Sixty percent of Apple users admit to blind loyalty to the product regardless of whether there are objectively better devices on the market, and it’s largely because they owned their first gen products like the iPod shuffle when it first came out. Tesla still hit record sales in the third quarter with 343,000 sold vehicles, despite the fact that they recalled 130,000 vehicles this March for a software bug that prevents access to rear view camera image and warning lights.

Sure, tech consumers are forgiving of the companies they’re biased to. But let’s be clear: Many of us don’t buy tech products purely for the tech features that their manufacturers promise. Technologies are reflections of human desire—whether it’s nostalgia, status, or affinity.

We want the tech we consume to fulfill our expectations, in exchange for our loyalty to the product. But that cannot realistically happen when the development of tech products lack the time, resources, or manpower to make something that does the fanbase or customers justice. 

Great things take time. Yes, bug-free games don’t exist, but taking the time to develop a video game leaves less room for error and inches developers closer to that ideal. So if Pokémon and Game Freak want to avoid a Cyberpunk 2077-like fiasco, they should know that patience during development breaks less hearts and costs less money in the long-run.

Because if a-close-to-perfect tech product means that developers don’t do overtime and loyal customers are happy, what’s a few more months of waiting?