Pokemon Scarlet and Violet
GameFreak
While Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are plagued by technical issues and suffer from low critic scores and user reviews, the games are also absolute sales monsters, proving that the series is stronger than ever in terms of player interest.
Nintendo has announced that Pokemon Scarlet and Violet have sold 10 million copies in their first three days, doubling the just-announced 5.1 million sales for God of War Ragnarok in its first week, which was a record for at Sony. Not only has Scarlet and Violet broken every record Nintendo has for fast-selling games, but that’s true for industry exclusives as well.
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet is now:
- The best selling Pokemon game ever.
- Best selling Switch game ever.
- Nintendo’s best selling game ever.
- The best-selling exclusive console game ever, from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.
With 10 million copies sold, assuming a price of roughly $60, that would be $600 million in sales in one weekend. That would be just shy of the $800 million sales weekend Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 announced a few weeks ago, a series record, and under the all-time record weekend sales of Grand Theft Auto 5’s $1 billion opening seems unlikely. replicated until… GTA 6. But yeah, you could consider what Pokemon Scarlet and Violet has done even more impressive since, again, it’s on one platform, when those other games usually launch on two generations of Xbox and PlayStation and Modern Warfare. 2 also had PC sales at launch.
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet
GameFreak
However, it’s a bit of a frustrating situation for fans, as a common complaint is that Nintendo and Game Freak need to realize that they need to stop releasing these games at such a fast rate, given that we’re in chaos right now technical at a level never seen before in the history of the series. While the core game is still a lot of fun, Scarlet and Violet suffer from terrible performance issues, ugly visuals, and funny/tragic bugs. But breaking almost every video game record at launch doesn’t exactly seem like a “take these lessons to heart” moment, and more like a green light to keep doing exactly what they’ve been doing, at the rate they’ve been. doing it
It is unclear what the fate of the games will be and how much will be fixed as time goes on. But Nintendo/Pokemon games aren’t usually known for big Cyberpunk/No Man’s Sky style transforming patches, so a lot of the game’s style is likely to stay there.
If you’re tempted to make a prediction that the poor technical state of Scarlet and Violet will produce inferior results for the next generation of Pokemon games, I understand that logic. And yet I would absolutely, never, ever bet against Pokémon, no matter what problems it faces. It’s a monster IP that has ruled the gaming industry for nearly a decade and a half, and all we’re seeing here is that it’s more powerful than ever.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Subscribe to my free weekly content digest newsletter, God Rolls.
Pick up my sci-fi novels, the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.