Pokémon Scarlet and Violet tell a paradoxical story about modern gaming. Despite receiving a Metacritic score of just 72%—the lowest rating of any core series Pokémon game—the titles became the second best-selling games in franchise history, reaching 26.79 million units sold by May 2025. The answer to why fans keep buying games they publicly criticize lies in a fundamental market reality: Pokémon has no serious competitors. When you’re the only major franchise offering a polished, triple-A creature-collecting experience, player dissatisfaction doesn’t translate into lost sales—it translates into grumbling customers who buy anyway.
The Pokémon Company’s continued success despite fan complaints reflects a broader dynamic in entertainment franchises. Players may complain about frame rate drops, low-resolution textures, and missing features, but they have nowhere else to go. The franchise generated over $12 billion in revenue in 2024, a number that would seem impossible if the quality problems were truly deal-breakers. Understanding why requires looking beyond review scores and diving into the economic and psychological forces that keep players buying.
Table of Contents
- Why Game Quality Alone Doesn’t Determine Sales Success
- The Absence of Competition in the Creature-Collecting Space
- The Sales Numbers vs. the Critical Reception Disconnect
- Brand Loyalty as a Substitute for Quality Assurance
- The Specific Technical and Design Problems That Didn’t Stop Sales
- How the Pokémon Company Responded to Internal Pressure
- What This Trend Means for the Franchise’s Future
- Conclusion
Why Game Quality Alone Doesn’t Determine Sales Success
The gap between critical reception and commercial success has widened in the pokémon franchise over the past few releases. Scarlet and Violet sold over 10 million copies in their first three days, a record for Nintendo at launch, despite widespread knowledge of the games’ technical problems. This happened because players had already decided they would buy the game before critics finished their reviews. Pre-orders, release-day purchases driven by franchise loyalty, and the desire to participate in the shared social experience of a new generation’s release created momentum that technical criticism couldn’t stop. Digimon offers an instructive comparison. While Digimon Survive and other recent entries in the creature-collecting space have received comparable or better reviews than Scarlet and Violet, they sell a fraction of the copies.
Digimon lacks the cultural penetration, the trading card game crossover, and the 30-year reputation that keeps Pokémon positioned as the default choice for monster-collecting games. A player might read that Scarlet and Violet have frame rate issues and still buy them because the alternative—waiting for a competitor that may never arrive—feels like no alternative at all. The psychology of franchise ownership also matters. Pokémon players have invested in the ecosystem: they own trading cards, they have favorite Pokémon from childhood, they’re embedded in communities built around the games. Switching to a competitor requires abandoning that history and starting fresh. The switching costs are psychological and social, not just financial.
The Absence of Competition in the Creature-Collecting Space
The creature-collecting genre has consolidated around Pokémon in ways that few franchises enjoy. Unlike shooters, where Call of Duty competes with Destiny and Apex Legends, or action games, where dozens of franchises fight for shelf space, Pokémon stands nearly alone in the triple-A creature-collecting space. This dominance gives the franchise unusual pricing power and customer retention despite quality issues. Competitors have tried and failed to displace Pokémon. Yo-Kai Watch was a cultural phenomenon in Japan but never achieved comparable reach in Western markets.
Nexo Knights, Skylanders, and numerous other creature-collection games launched with significant investment and marketing but couldn’t overcome Pokémon’s accumulated advantages. Digimon Survive, released in 2022, received a respectable 73 Metacritic score—essentially tied with Scarlet and Violet—yet sold an estimated 1.5 million copies compared to Scarlet and Violet’s 26.79 million. The difference isn’t quality; it’s brand. This market concentration creates a warning signal for players: the franchise has little incentive to dramatically improve if there’s nowhere else to go. The Pokémon Company acknowledged this internally, stating it would address quality concerns for future releases, but the lack of external competitive pressure means changes come on the company’s schedule, not players’ demands.
The Sales Numbers vs. the Critical Reception Disconnect
The data reveals a franchise operating in two different universes simultaneously. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet entered the market as the lowest-rated mainline games ever, yet achieved the second-highest sales in series history. The gap between critical response and commercial success has never been wider. This disconnect didn’t happen by accident—it’s the result of specific market conditions aligning in Pokémon’s favor. Part of this gap stems from when reviews publish versus when players buy. Pokémon games sell the majority of their copies in the first two weeks after release, before comprehensive reviews circulate to mainstream audiences.
By the time players read detailed breakdowns of frame rate problems and missing features, many have already committed to purchase. The review cycle works against informed decision-making for franchises with this much launch momentum. Another factor is segmentation. Core competitive players and content creators focus intensely on reviews and technical performance. Casual players—who may represent the majority of purchases—are less influenced by Metacritic scores. A parent buying the game for their child’s birthday, a longtime fan making an impulse purchase, or a player who hasn’t followed gaming news sees the Pokémon logo and buys based on prior positive experiences. These players never read the critical consensus.
Brand Loyalty as a Substitute for Quality Assurance
Pokémon benefits from one of gaming’s strongest brand loyalties. Players who grew up with the franchise carry that attachment into adulthood, and they pass it to their children. This creates a multi-generational customer base that persists regardless of whether the latest game is technically impressive. A 35-year-old who played Red and Blue in 1996 might buy Scarlet and Violet primarily for nostalgia, not because the games are objectively good. This dynamic creates a tradeoff for players. Brand loyalty ensures new games get made and exist in a relatively stable, mainstream ecosystem.
The downside is that franchises with strong loyalty have less incentive to innovate or maintain technical standards. Pokémon players essentially trade potential quality improvements for guaranteed future releases and a reliable social experience. Smaller franchises that depend on critical acclaim to drive sales may be more responsive to feedback, but they also face the risk of cancellation if sales drop below thresholds. The trading card game ecosystem reinforces this lock-in effect. Players who collect Pokémon cards naturally buy the video games, and players who play the video games buy related merchandise and cards. These cross-ecosystem purchases create multiple reasons to stay committed to the franchise, even when individual products disappoint.
The Specific Technical and Design Problems That Didn’t Stop Sales
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet launched with well-documented technical problems: frame rate drops that dipped below 30 frames per second in populated areas, low-resolution textures on buildings and characters, long load times between areas, and crashes in certain conditions. These aren’t minor polish issues—they’re the kind of problems that would generate criticism for any game. Yet they didn’t prevent the games from becoming bestsellers. The design complaints ran parallel to technical issues. Players noted missing features compared to previous games: the National Pokédex wasn’t included, certain Pokémon couldn’t learn moves they’d learned in prior games, and the Battle Tower—a staple of recent releases—was absent at launch.
The open-world structure, while praised as a fresh direction, had execution problems, with some areas feeling empty and others feeling overcrowded without meaningful design purpose. These represent substantial content gaps, not minor omissions. However, the games still delivered the core Pokémon experience: catching creatures, building a team, battling trainers, and exploring a new world. For many players, these fundamental elements matter more than technical performance or missing features. A warning worth noting: players who spent money on these games at launch discovered the problems after purchase. Future buyers might make more informed choices, but the franchise still moves millions of copies before critical consensus fully crystallizes.
How the Pokémon Company Responded to Internal Pressure
The Pokémon Company publicly acknowledged the criticism and internally discussed quality and release timing concerns. This acknowledgment, while welcome, has concrete limitations. Acknowledging a problem is not the same as solving it. The company stated it would address these issues for future releases, but no specific changes or extended development timelines have been announced.
This leaves players in a position of waiting for evidence that feedback actually produces results. The company’s response reflects the limited pressure external criticism places on dominant franchises. In competitive markets, poor reviews can tank sales within weeks, forcing rapid course corrections. Pokémon’s market position means the company can absorb criticism, acknowledge it broadly, and proceed with development plans established years before the criticism arrived. The next generation games may improve based on Scarlet and Violet feedback, but that’s more because development cycles are naturally iterative than because the company faced commercial consequences for quality problems.
What This Trend Means for the Franchise’s Future
The Pokémon Company faces a strategic choice that the strong sales numbers don’t necessarily make obvious. Sales dominance can mask the early signs of player burnout. When players buy games despite being disappointed, they’re not indicating happiness—they’re indicating a lack of options and the residual momentum of past positive experiences. Those conditions can persist for years or even decades, but they’re not infinitely renewable.
As creature-collecting games technology improves and competitor budgets grow, Pokémon’s technical performance gap relative to other franchises may become harder to ignore. A Digimon game made with triple-A investment could eventually represent a genuine alternative. The company’s internal discussions about quality suggest they recognize this risk, even if quarterly sales numbers don’t reflect it yet. The franchise’s future depends on whether the Pokémon Company uses its market dominance to maintain and improve quality, or whether it treats market dominance as a permanent condition.
Conclusion
Pokémon games keep selling despite fan complaints because the franchise occupies a unique market position with no meaningful competition and strong cross-ecosystem integration. Scarlet and Violet reached 26.79 million units sold despite being the lowest-rated core series games, proving that critical reception alone doesn’t determine commercial success when a franchise has this much brand loyalty and no alternatives exist. The underlying lesson extends beyond Pokémon: dominant franchises operate under different market pressures than competitive ones.
The company has acknowledged quality concerns and promised improvements, which suggests they recognize the risk of taking player loyalty for granted. Whether that acknowledgment produces real change, and whether future competitors eventually disrupt the market, remains to be seen. For now, Pokémon’s market dominance persists despite the quality gap—but that dominance is not guaranteed to last forever.
