 People are getting refunds for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, in particular the digital version. Nintendo is granting an exception refund for the game to pretty much anyone who calls into customer support and attempts to get a refund, because normally game purchases are finalized when you buy them on Switch, even if you pre-order a game, but Nintendo does do exceptions sometimes, and their customer support is handing out exceptions for Scarlet and Violet if you bought it and you're disappointed with the game's performance, not the content, but the performance. If you complain about the content of the game, I'm not so sure, they'll give you the refund, but if you're just talking about from a technical perspective, the frame rate issues, the graphical glitches, the unacceptable nature you find the game to be in, Nintendo is offering refunds. They're not really publicizing that they're doing this, but there's a giant thread on Reddit about it, 3,000 upvotes and hundreds of comments, and I think it's quite interesting looking at this situation, not because I find the state that Scarlet and Violet release into be acceptable, even though I'm having a really good time and I'm not gonna request a refund, it's cool if you are, but I do find this to be an interesting conversation on how big of an issue is this and why do I think Game Freak and Nintendo are going to get away with it anyways, and what does this all mean for the future of Pokemon, let alone other Nintendo games? I'm seeing people bring up other big Nintendo games coming up as well, as if this is suddenly gonna be a problem with them because it's a problem here and they're going to get away with it. Now, before I do that, I wanna remind you guys that this video is sponsored by Into the AM. Into the AM creates amazing shirts like this. These shirts have a really nice blend of materials given a super soft feel. They are pre-shrunk and you can go to IntoTheAM.com slash Nintendo Prime 10 to get 10% off your order. Also what's interesting is they have a bunch of sales going on, it is Cyber Monday, it is that time of the year, they have some shirts discounted as low as $6 right now. That is massive. You guys should definitely go check out IntoTheAM.com and get your order in now for the holidays. So one aspect of this I wanna talk about is why are they going to get away with this? See, while this Reddit thread seems big and we've seen, I don't know, probably 50,000, maybe 100,000 tweets complaining about this and trying to get refunds on Twitter, the game sold over 10 million copies in 10 days. That means that of the grand total of complaints, and this is, let's say every person who's publicly complained about this is going to get a refund just based on YouTube stats, social media and Reddit and in various places like that, just gathering all of the trending number of comments and videos and all that, it was only about 400,000 of them. To put that in perspective, if you grab your old calculator and you do some quick math on 10 million copies and having 400,000 people talk about getting refunds or at least complaining enough where it seems like they might consider refunds, you're roughly gonna get about 0.04% of the audience. Unless my math is wrong on that, don't think my math's wrong, but it's a very small percent of the audience that's actually getting these refunds. To the point that they absolutely are going to get away with this broken mess of a game. They're just going to, it's going to happen. By now, the games probably sold 12 to 14 million, wouldn't be surprised if it's even higher than that. The bottom line is they're gonna get away with this for a number of reasons. I talked about how this game fulfills the promise in some ways, of course. Some people, because it's so broken, will say it doesn't fulfill any promise, but it does deliver an open world Pokemon game and love it or hate it. People have been dreaming about a truly open world Pokemon game for 20 years. So it does deliver that game. It might not deliver it well, but it does deliver it. So because it does that, and because people like the content of the game, they're gonna end up getting away with it because a lot of people still find the game fun. While there's a lot of frame rate issues, unlike other games, this is a turn-based game where you spend a lot of time in menus. And because of that, the frame rate ends up maybe not being as big a deal to a lot of people, even though it sucks because, frankly, it just isn't really inhibitive to the gameplay. It is inhibitive to character movement, but beyond that, Pokemon is mostly played through a menu system, right? The battles, the turns, the pokeballs, the management, it's almost all through menus. The open world travel isn't really, it's just not that big of a deal. It's not like you're gonna get hit by an enemy and die in the open world. That's just not what happens. So that's not the kind of game this is. It's not an action game. So because it's not an action RPG or anything like that, it leads to it maybe not being as big a deal to someone. That's another reason why it'll be forgiven. On top of that, a lot of kids that play Pokemon also play games on really cheap Amazon tablets and stuff like that, where they're used to having lag in Minecraft and lag in things like Roblox just because the tablets are $100 or less tablets their parents might get them. And they don't run the games very well. So they're also used to lag. So then when they see lag and frame rate issues in this game on their Switch, it just isn't as jarring to them because they just kind of grew up expecting that. We can argue that's kind of crap, but hey, I grew up playing four FPS, World of Warcraft, 40 man raids back in the day. And yeah, I've seen frame rates way worse than this. So I am not gonna say I'm used to it because I've grown up and become more accustomed to higher refresh rates, but I am used to lower frame rates, especially on Nintendo Switch. I've seen frame rate dips in a lot of games on Switch and it doesn't bother me as much as it once did, although I obviously would prefer for it to run smoother and yeah, people have modded the game and gotta run at 60 FPS, but they're gonna get away with it. The franchise is too big, it's selling too well and too many people aren't bothered enough to get refunds. Now, the other point I see people make is that they're going to then because they're gonna get away with this, we need to worry about tears of the kingdom. We need to worry about future Nintendo games because Nintendo could look at this and go, man, if an IP is so big like Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, and can just release broken and still sell well, then yeah, let's just be a bit lazier about things. Let's not optimize our games as well and just crap them out. I don't know that that is going to be the case. What we need to remember is that Game Freak operates to the beat of the Pokemon company's drum. TPC is the one that says, here's the schedule, here's how long you have to make the game or putting out whatever the hell you have done. So good luck. It makes it very hard to make a game like this in an open world setting in strict timeframes like that. I mean, Zelda went open world and took five years to develop and now the next open world Zelda game is taking six years of development. I mean, we have to think about this to make an open world game like this takes a lot of time for Game Freak to decide, hey, let's take this game open world, that decision, maybe you wanna argue with that decision, but that decision meant there was probably gonna be problems because it takes so long to do an open world game properly from an optimization and bug standpoint, they were never gonna have the time allotted by TPC to do that. So you look at it from that perspective and you go, man, should they just not have made an open world Pokemon game? We would not have had this many issues if they didn't, but then we also would never get an open world Pokemon game then because the excuse would always be we don't have enough time to make one. So do they release this one and just gotta patch it and make it better and make it better and make it better moving forward? Look, that's clearly what I think they're gonna try to do, but this is not indicative of what the rest of Nintendo's games are going to be. For starters, Aegean almost in charge of Zelda right now. He's never let a Zelda game release in that state. You think he's suddenly gonna do it now? You think the leaders of Mario are suddenly gonna do it now just because Pokemon got away with it? You think they're gonna release the next Mario Kart game? This will, you know, the last one's will 40 million plus. Then they're gonna release the next one in a broken buggy falling through the ground state. No, that's just not what Nintendo does. Nintendo's always willing to delay games to make them better, but Nintendo isn't in charge of the Pokemon company or a game freak. Now, maybe Nintendo could try to exercise some of the power over the IP they have to get games delayed, but I just don't know that they have enough. We gotta remember, while Nintendo owns the copyright, the trademark to Pokemon, everything about the Pokemon franchise is co-owned by Creatures Inc and Pokemon Company and Nintendo. Like, it's all co-owned. So because of this, I'm not sure that Nintendo has enough power to force the Pokemon company to be like, hey, you need to let them delay this game. I just don't know that Nintendo has enough power. They might, but I just don't know that they do. And for Nintendo's purposes, as long as they're getting their cut of the check at the end of the day, they're usually pretty happy with whatever the Pokemon company does. They just want their money off of whatever licensing and fees and stuff they get. Plus, obviously, we know they get at least a 30% cut of game sales, probably 50% for Pokemon, I would assume. Probably goes 50% to Nintendo, 50% to the Pokemon company and Creatures Inc and stuff like that. I'm not sure in the exact cut there, but look guys, this isn't gonna impact Nintendo's other games. Until we see evidence to the contrary, there's no reason to believe this. Tears of the Kingdom is likely gonna be a pretty polished game when it comes out. And if it's not and it's as broken as this game, then yes, we can point back to Pokemon and go, oh, see, see, see, Pokemon started this. But Pokemon has had issues before. There's been bugs. There's been broken messes. There's been crashing. We've had issues with Pokemon in the past and it's never impacted Nintendo's other franchises. I don't think we need to worry about that right now. I think a lot of this is just people fear mongering a little bit or maybe just so upset about this, they wanna find other reasons to be mad at Nintendo. And look, I think there's plenty of reasons to be mad at Nintendo. I just don't know that this is one of them. What I can tell you is I'm much happier with the state of my back after getting my E-win racing chairs. You guys should go check it out, 20% off code down below with a link you guys should definitely go take advantage of that. Thank you E-win racing for being a partner to the channel. But, look guys, I think that I'm frustrated in multiple ways about Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, yet I'm still having fun. And it's such, it's like an inner battle I'm having where I'm having fun. All of this over here bothers me, but I'm still having fun. But all of this bothers me. It reminds me when I was a kid and when I was a kid, this stuff over here bothered me and fun. Well, fun mattered like this. And this stuff over here was like down in the garbage can. I wasn't even thinking about it. I was just too busy having fun. And the problem is if I raise the fun level and start emphasizing on that in my brain more than this, it makes people feel like I'm diminishing this. And that's not really the case. I'm just, I'm having enough fun that this isn't enough to make me not wanna play anymore. So, I don't think that's gonna be the case for games moving forward. I do think if you wanna go get a refund and you bought it digitally, physical refunds are totally different. That goes through retailers. Retail outlets usually don't do physical refunds. So that's not even on Nintendo. That's one of the benefits of buying digitally is you get to deal with Nintendo themselves who are more flexible with refunds than a retailer is. But that's neither here nor there. Guys, do whatever you need to do. You need to get your refunds, get your refunds. I'm gonna sit back and probably still beat the game and enjoy it, release, quote unquote, beat the game. I'll beat the main story, get all the badges and all that stuff. I don't know that I'll ever complete the Pokedex or anything like that and catch every shiny out there, but I am having a good time with it. It is probably the most fun I've ever had with Pokemon and that's coming ironically with one of the worst optimized, most fundamentally broken Pokemon games to date. And I just have a hard time wrestling with it in my brain, but what I am sure about, this shouldn't affect tears of the kingdom. This shouldn't affect the next Mario or Mario Kart or anything like that. We have years and years of Nintendo releasing games on Switch that weren't like this. So I don't think we need to worry just because this one game is gonna get away with it and sell incredibly well 20, 30 million that suddenly every game is gonna be this way. We need to actually see more evidence of that. Anyways, guys, thank you so much for tuning in. I am Nathan Robledjens from Nathan Prime. Let me know what you think about this down in the comments below and I'll catch you in the next video.