 Today we're going to be talking about something that is a little interesting that requires a bit of a journey to get to where we are today because we all know that in some regards the Pokemon series is in a little bit of a mess and I want to be careful in saying that because this isn't to state that Pokemon's in any sort of trouble or the series isn't going well and that people aren't enjoying playing the game so that's clearly not the case. The highest rated Pokemon game of all time dropped last year in Pokemon Legends RCS but we also know all of the issues that Scarlet and Violet had and how embarrassed Nintendo was and we also know that it's entirely possible that there are something or at least something happening internally at Game Preak and at the Pokemon company that might lead to changes changes that are not only positive for the series but a big deal in several ways and we have basically the person running the Pokemon company making some comments just the other day suggesting major changes are ahead for Game Freak at the Pokemon company and how they handle Pokemon games. Before I get into this video I just want to remind you that we're on a roll to 150,000 subscribers so if you guys enjoyed this video I would appreciate if you would drop a like maybe leave a comment below subscribe to the channel and wringling that dingling so you get notified of all future videos but first we have to start on this journey and I think it really begins the first sign of real change or what is going to become change honestly began all the way back in December of last year and that's because of this little update or in particular this text right here and this is on the Nintendo of America update page and it was repeated by Nintendo of Europe and put in Nintendo of Japan about issues going on with Pokemon Scarlet and Violet and it went on to say that we are aware that players may encounter issues that affect the game's performance our goal is always to give players a positive experience with our games and we apologize for the inconvenience we take the feedback from players seriously and are working on improvements to the games now we all know a performance patch never really came they took care of some of the bugs and some of that stuff but they never really fixed the FPS they didn't fix some of the game breaking stuff like falling through the world that still happens to some players so there's a lot of things that they essentially never did and they never really touched the performance of the game a lot of people that argue the performance has gotten better it's more of a placebo effect play the game longer there's still problems so it is what it is but it was the first sign from Nintendo that something isn't right with Pokemon and they're not happy with it you know they've made other statements as well but this was the very first sign that you know what if Nintendo has to apologize for a game that sold 20 million in three months that is something that they're not going to be happy with they don't want to have to apologize they don't Nintendo doesn't like to be embarrassed and that's sort of what Scarlet and Violet did it during the biggest highest selling sale season of the year all of the headlines around switch were how embarrassing Scarlet and Violet was so yeah that's not great that's not a good way to do it now before all of this though there was already some signs that things might be changing at game freak and that's because we see this post over here at my nintendo news where it says the job was seen for pokemon dev creatures mentioned r&d for next-gen hardware now this doesn't mean a whole lack of creatures does work for other companies as well but what's interesting in here is they are currently looking for a 3d cg modeler according to a recent job lesson however what makes the job somewhat interesting is that it mentions research and development for next-gen hardware and it also mentions unity and unreal engine keep unreal engine in mind here because this might come up a little bit later but this was the first sign that maybe something might be changing but again this was back in november of last year clearly wasn't going to make a difference for scarlet and violet at that point but it was interesting they were hiring people that wanted unity and unreal engine experience for next-gen hardware does that mean switch to did that mean playstation 5 and xbox series creatures does most of their work specifically for game freak and nintendo but they do a few projects outside of it so it was easy to sort of dismiss this as not meaning much or possibly meaning something and we have to continue this story because we have another listing here and this one's actually the earliest we've seen anything related to an engine that pokemon doesn't use and this is back in 2017 to see fans are losing their minds over this pokemon related job listing and this is supposed to back again 2017 so this is back in the first year of switch and we all know that well nothing much really changed with pokemon game since then but this is what got fans in a tizzy back in the day so just going over some things is that creatures ink was hiring people for 3d models and unreal engine so this is just the first time that creatures ink was doing something again doesn't necessarily mean anything because creatures ink was always doing stuff for other companies as well but specifically they do stuff for pokemon and again when we go back to that prior job listing this is actually something brand new and this is the one that mentions next-gen hardware the last one didn't who knows i mean it is entirely possible that creatures ink does use unreal engine to create the models then the models are ported into a new or a different engine so well look how creatures ink does their work i have no idea but that's not really what's most interesting because now we get into this now this is where we show evidence that game freak is doing something beyond pokemon now they've always made games beyond pokemon and most of you guys haven't really played them but private division else is a publishing partnership with game freak for an action adventure title called project bloom now we don't even know if this is coming to nintendo switch or nintendo switch 2 but they uh what's your developer game freak for a new action adventure coden project what was currently in early development especially the launch in the private ninja parent company take two interactive fiscal year 2026 so we thrilled to have the opportunity to create a new ip that is bold and totally different from the prior works the game freak director kota furushima from the beginning private division was the publisher we wanted to work with on our new game their track record and global expertise gives us the confidence to create a sweeping new action adventure game we want to share with the future this is just you know project bloom game freak this is like some fan art for not fan art some official art and i gotta say looks pretty good i'm excited to see what game freak does with this uh the private division head take two interactive chief strategy officer michael waritz added over the past three decades eb hard press final studio which are these more iconic hits than game freak i mean it's pokemon pokemon pokemon pokemon so we don't know again if this is coming but i wanted to note this game here because the the reality is everything we're talking about could just be related to project bloom but then again does this look like something being made i know this is just art but does this look like a game being made with a pokemon engine like some of game freak's other work you can argue is maybe made with the pokemon engine does this look like a game made with the pokemon engine and remember this was announced you know back in gosh this article went up back earlier this year on may ninth so when you think about that and you think about project bloom you wonder huh so game freak is doing something that's more ambitious with a different engine already and it was announced this year now more on this back in june at 2016 game freak has an unreal engine job posting okay so i just told you project bloom chances are it's going to be using an unreal engine that's my just just a shot in the dark so all this could be for is that uh but we're gonna look at some stuff here's a game freak user proprietary engine for the last main line series titles pokemon scottland violet which came out in november of 2022 the recent job listing for unreal engine based technical artists has sparked a lively conversation on the game's official subreddit this brought forward some expectations of players from the franchise and their concerns about nintendo as a platform and you can kind of see the post here put up by lu too look yeah they're hiring people for unreal engine right that's just reality they are factually hiring unreal engine developers it is what it is it it's it's exciting in some regards but then we have to get to we have to get to a bit of the rumor mill so you guys might remember this post over here from zippo that we put up a while ago talk about this partnership between nintendo and unreal when you went down it highlighted that game freak was going to be one of the companies using unreal engine now again this post was you know quite recent and we already knew that they were hiring people for unreal engine so it wasn't a big leap to be all game freaks using unreal engine probably for project bloom but also with creatures ink having people on staff that are familiar with unreal engine now you have obviously people on game freak side familiar with unreal engine and making project bloom makes you wonder is there going to be changes afoot but look if that's all there was it would just be all speculation at this point and we would just say hey yeah they have some unreal engine deaths it's just a project bloom it has nothing to do with pokemon pokemon isn't changing pokemon isn't going anywhere the only thing suggesting anything would be nintendo just being upset with the pokemon company but that doesn't mean that anything's going to change that was until this happened and for once comic book dot com is actually the source on this really good investigating journalism by them so it says the pokemon company coo addresses the possibility of slowing down game releases now the pokemon company is having conversations about how to ensure that future pokemon games are quality products while being released on a regular release schedule at the pokemon world championships in yokohama japan comic book dot com had the opportunity to participate in a group interview with dakoto yutsunamiya i i totally butchered all that i'm really sorry he's the chief operating officer of the pokemon company while the interview was limited to overall questions about the brand as focused to specifics about the game or anime comic book dot com did ask whether there was a specific schedule that the pokemon brand was beholden to when it comes to the release of new games and here is his response i think in general if you look at the past the path we've taken up until now has been this constant release always regularly releasing products on a fairly fixed kind of cadence you might say he responded via a translator always having these products able to be introduced and new experiences for our customers and that's how we've operated up until now i think we're still operating in that way but there's more and more conversations as the development environments change about how we can continue to do this while making sure that we're ensuring really quality products are also being introduced it was the closest we may get to an acknowledgement about the issues faced by pokemon scarlet and violet which faced significant technical issues post release the games have required several significant patches since then game freak the developer of the pokemon land series has released a new pokemon game almost on an annual schedule since the franchise launched in 96 over 27 years only seven years of past when game freak has not released a new mainline series game or remake etc we will note that the introduction of pokemon sword and shield provided a new wrinkle to the release schedule as game freak opted to release dlc in 2020 instead of a new game or remake dlc for pokemon scarlet and violet is also due in 2023 so what's interesting about all of these statements is the pokemon company which which resides over the entire pokemon franchise from games to anime to cards to merchandise everything in between is recognizing publicly without naming the games that there is a problem with their development pipeline of pokemon games uh well again they're not going to throw their current games under the bus and i don't expect them to be as forthright as nintendo because nintendo was caught off guard and was just immediately responding like holy crud this game is really bad in terms of technical performance as all people are talking about we need to get in front of this and apologize the pokemon company is not going to do that uh you look the game sold 20 plus million units so i'm not going to apologize but what they will do is at least in this case recognize that there is something going on uh and and and there's something about maybe taking more time with games something about the development environments are changing today compared to what they used to be and they want to make sure they're releasing quality products it's one of those recognitions that the pokemon company is vastly aware of the criticism of scarlet and violet and what they're trying to do moving forward is find a way to maybe keep up their cadence of releases without you know affecting the quality of the experience and when you talk about this and he mentioned the development environments specifically it makes you wonder you know when you have an unreal engine you know developers being hired and you see gamefreak working on an unrelated product using those developers when you see rumors out there when you see that creatures ink has been hiring unreal developers for years it makes you look and wonder you know what nintendo themselves is using unreal engine and not just in you know side games like yoshi or something right like that was done by a third party company they want to use unreal okay use unreal nintendo themselves used it with one of their internal studios for pikmin 4 nintendo is not happy with what happened at the release of scarlet and violet i have to wonder if there is a change coming at gamefreak and with the pokemon company or they're finally gonna decide we need to get off of that old 3ds engine that we keep you know rehashing and modifying for modern hardware it's clearly not made for modern hardware it was made for hardware that basically can run on a calculator at this point and what we need is something that's meant for today's games on today's hardware and maybe unreal engine is just a quick and easy way to go they don't need to develop a new engine from the ground up they clearly do not want to make a new engine from the ground up it's a heavy investment it causes game delays and there's no guarantee that they even have the ability to do that right now when there's already ready made engines that work really really well as proven with games like you know yoshi and you know pikmin 4 work really well with nintendo's current hardware and that's where they're making games now there's obviously going to be growing pains with this i'll give you an example the next pokemon games are not going to have pokemon home support out the gate granted nor discard them violet but they're not probably a pokemon home support out the gate because getting the game to interact properly with pokemon home making sure that the pokemon they want to be transferred in work make sure the pokemon they want to be transferred out you know also work with all the other games is going to be something that is quite difficult and i know this doesn't make up for any of the other reasons that you guys might dislike the pokemon company or dislike the pokemon games today but reality is i do think the pokemon company well i don't know if it's going to be with their next game which is probably already in development or deep into development let's say the pokemon legends game right like that next pokemon legends game or whatever or whatever is coming next year i don't expect next year's game to be on unreal engine i want to make this very clear i think they're still going to use the engine they have now because the game would have already been in development but i do think they are considering after that maybe it's the next mainline pokemon game even that you know like the next new generation game i guess is what i should say like the next generation of pokemon that maybe they're going to be using unreal engine and in using unreal engine they might find a better performing game a better looking game and be able to do so much more than they ever could with that modified 3ds engine i think the pokemon company is going to find themselves and game freak and creatures like extremely happy using something like unreal engine versus what they're using now so while this is no guarantee that the future of pokemon you know probably after next year is going to be something unreal engine related you know all the pokemon games coming does nintendo switch to when they're exclusive are going to end up being an unreal engine there's no proof or the the decided uh i shouldn't say there's no evidence but there's no you know guarantee that's going to happen i will note that it seems possible they keep hiring it keeps coming up creatures ink and game freak and nintendo and pokemon company unreal engine just keeps coming up as does the admission that something needs to change on the development side as does the admission from nintendo that they're not happy with what's happening with pokemon so in the end i think change is afoot i think nintendo is going to help them now that they have experience with unreal engine guarantee they're going to be helping out and trying to encourage them to use the best in fact i'm actually wondering if after this whole you know thing went down and nintendo caught wind and got pissed about this whole pokemon thing and you need to apologize publicly if it was nintendo themselves that went to game freak and said hey you guys we got to do something different how about let's try out unreal engine because all of the unreal engine hiring posts at game freak happened this year notably after nintendo apologized publicly back in december you have to wonder if there was a little influence there then you throw out hey let's make a partnership with a company that's going to force us to use unreal engine okay cool they're doing this project bloom thing project bloom again that art looks really great but we don't really know what the game is going to be action adventure rpg whatever but we know that probably through that you know they're like hey let's let's play around with this and in playing around with it i think it's coming over to pokemon i think by i hate saying this far out but i believe by 2030 we will finally have a pokemon game running entirely on unreal engine so that's just my prediction you guys let me know you think about this down in the comments below i don't talk a lot about pokemon because you look i'm not a heavy pokemon player i enjoy pokemon legends that's like legends rcs was just that that to me was wonderful didn't visually not great but just an excellent gaming experience and i want to see pokemon continue to find ways to innovate improve and and get to a spot where we all can just be proud of what we're playing that being said i do want to thank you guys so much for being here i am Nathaniel Rumpeljantz from nintendo prime and i'll catch you guys in that next video