“Hilariously out of touch.” I love doing these petty over effort responses, so here we go.
My comment about indie games beating AAA increasing over the years is pretty easy to show. At the time of this comment Palworld has the 3rd highest player peak of all time on Steam at 2,101,867.
The peer release for pokemon Z-A sold 5.8 million. Palworld has sold 25 million.
“But Palworld came out first.” This is an early access indie game that has possibly beaten, or at least matched, Game Freak’s flagship. Judging by the complete lack of effort and the poor quality of Z-A, that flagship is sinking fast.
Source: https://steamdb.info/charts/?sort=peak
Click “About” and you’ll see that the top ten over the last year have been dominated by indies or small studios. This isn’t just the PC scene either.
The age demographic is objectively older. Nintendo themselves (yes, six years ago, but still their data):
“According to our latest data, we have seen that the ratio of players in their 20s and 30s has risen for Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon compared to past Pokémon titles for Nintendo 3DS.”
Source: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2017/170201_2e.pdf
More recent (2021):
Source: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2021/211105e.pdf
A more recent take, though not official:
Source: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/nintendo-says-i-pokemon-i-players-are-now-older-than-ever
Accusing me of being in an echo chamber when I’m actually invested in Nintendo is wild. I put my money where my mouth is, so I do this weird thing where I trawl through their PDFs, look at the market as a whole, follow the trends and form my opinion based on that.
Have a good weekend, everyone!