What went wrong with Pokémon Scarlet and Violet? The vast majority of professional reviews and player experiences paint the same picture. The latest Pokémon games are filled with choppy frame rates, performance issues, muddy textures and glitches. All of this is underpinned with a general consensus that, behind the technical flaws, the games themselves are filled with good ideas and a solid framework. Scarlet and Violet are promising titles that simply suffer from lackluster execution. So what happened here? What caused Game Freak to release the glitchiest games since, well, the original Pokémon games on the Game Boy? As we noted in our video about Ed Sheeran's involvement with Scarlet and Violet, Game Freak has been unusually quiet during the development of these games. This stands in stark contrast to the making of Sword and Shield, during which Game Informer journalists noted that they were invited to ask literally anything they wanted of senior developers Unici Masuda and Shigeru Umori. From Game Informer's time with Game Freak though, we can gather a portrait of a studio that is somewhat at odds with its corporate overseers. Game Freak has always been a relatively small studio, in spite of its financial success. During the initial leap to switch hardware, the number of full-time employees are approximately doubled, jumping from around 100 to nearly 200. While the studio has continued to grow, and moved into some pretty new offices in the same building as Nintendo's Tokyo branch, Game Freak's higher-ups strongly resist endless expansion, in an effort to maintain the small studio indie spirit of early Pokémon development. According to Game Informer, why not expand bigger? When the game's sell as well as they do, it's one of the most popular games ever made. This team could have a destiny scope and size if it wanted to. It's the premier RPG mainline series which is driving everything forward. You'd think they could throw a lot more behind it, so why don't they? And talking with Masuda about that is interesting. Masuda was just stressing, hey, I would love to make games with 20 people if I could. That is my ideal. He's just so insistent on the way he put it was. If we have a bigger team, there's too many branches on that tree. He wants to keep it small because communicating is so challenging on development teams. It comes up over and over again with AAA games. Communication is just what sinks a lot of projects. Puts them in development hell. It would get so messy and complicated and just a disaster. So keeping that team as tight as possible while still being able to crank out this mainline RPG series is their mission. I think the community wouldn't mind if they ballooned, but Game Freak has such small indie routes. And Masuda is the spiritual lead of that studio at this point. And his desire to keep things small is a fascinating disconnect with what the community might like. This small studio approach means that key decision-making is centralized, allowing for a few core developers to make the majority of the big choices about game development. This is likely why the core of Scarleton Violet remains so engaging. A team of experienced developers who know very well what they're doing, having carefully crafted the game's world. This also goes some way to explaining why Scarleton Violet's visual and technical presentation suffers. A team of a few hundred people simply don't have the time or people power to create something that stands shoulder to shoulder with other open world titles on the switch. The core team at Game Freak need help. And they have it. Scarleton Violet Director Shigeru Umori has stated that, in addition to the full-time developers at Game Freak, a variety of third-party companies and contractors have a hand in making these games, including marketing teams and playtesters nearly a thousand people worked on Sword and Shield, which means that, as a result of Game Freak's attempt to stay indie-sized and insular, the vast majority of developers who worked on the game only had a loose connection to the core team-making decisions. According to Umori, this approach does come with drawbacks. It definitely gets harder. I think the bigger the project gets and the more complex things get, it can get more difficult to make sure that everyone's on the same page and that you're conveying the same message to everyone and they're understanding it. For example, I definitely have to get more specialists, like programmers who are experts in a very specific field of technology, and making sure I understand what they're doing, but also making sure they understand what the goal for the game they're developing is. Working with so many outside developers creates bottlenecks in programming and art, as many of the developers providing 3D model assets are from Creatures Inc, rather than Game Freak. Nevertheless, this choice to prioritize gameplay ideas over technical proficiency has been part of Game Freak's strategy for Pokemon since the beginning, and it's a large part of the reason why the franchise has been so consistently successful over the past 3 decades. Said Unichima Suda, from a creative perspective, it's part of a discussion we've had at Game Freak with Nintendo and the Pokemon Company, and we came to the decision that, at some point, we need to be able to prioritize new gameplay ideas. We need to be able to find a way to balance the right number of Pokemon and also still introduce new ways for the players to enjoy the game. New gameplay ideas to keep the series fresh and enjoyable far into the future. Game Freak and the Pokemon Company are synonymous in the eyes of many players, but the two companies do have different goals and interests. According to Game Informer, that's what's fascinating about the studio. It has such an indie spirit, and they're pushing this entire franchise along with the main RPG series. Meanwhile, the Juggernaut Nintendo owns a chunk of Pokemon. The Pokemon Company at this point obviously owns a chunk of Pokemon, so these mega corporations are all looking to and counting on a relatively small-ish team to keep moving ahead. It's worth noting that Miseda has now left Game Freak and taken up a more senior role in the Pokemon Company, suggesting there may be more synergy between the two companies in the future. That said, there are problems caused by working to the Pokemon Company's strict annual publishing schedule. Designing the world, characters and monsters of each Pokemon game takes a long time. The designers at Game Freak think very carefully about how each new Pokemon will fit into their fictional canon. According to Omori, it definitely takes a decent amount of time. I'd say the fastest for coming up with an idea and actually implementing it completely in the game would be at least three months per character. You know, having them all move in parallel, it's not just creating that outward appearance of the Pokemon. You've got to make sure that then you build the model and make sure it's within the limits for the polygons, rig it with all the bones and everything, texture it and make it look how we set it up, and then send it to the animators, have them create all the different animations, review those to make sure they still match the idea, and then eventually put it in the game and make sure that everything works in there. So it's definitely a pretty involved process. This period of design eats into a game's development schedule and with annual releases, once the lengthy planning stage is complete, it's often a matter of doing the best possible job with the remaining time. Said Masuda, in any design situation, resources and time are always a constraint on what you can do in a project. It's very likely that Game Freak were wholly aware of the many bugs and glitches within Scarlet and Violet, but were unable to deal with them before launch due to the game's aggressive release schedule. Game Freak then is desperately trying to hold on to a small indie developer mentality, while dealing with the needs of two of the biggest entertainment companies on the planet. Hence the annual releases of Pokemon games, whether or not each new title could do with a little more polish. The budget for these games has increased, the number of developers working on each title has increased, the amount of time each project is given though has not changed. As is evidenced by Pokemon Legends Archaeus, which released late based on the annual release schedule, when Game Freak has a little more time to make improvements to a game, it is more positively received. The company is simply not always given the luxury of delaying a game when more time would be helpful. It seems that this practice of not scheduling enough time for each Game Freak Pokemon title is unlikely to change in the near future. Sales reports show that Scarlet and Violet had the second best opening weekend sales of any Pokemon title except Sun and Moon on the Nintendo DS. From a business perspective, the system works. Game Freak can just about manage to keep up with the standard release schedule, bringing out a new game, a remake or DLC each year. These games may be rough around the edges, but until the profits for each title drop significantly, the Pokemon company has no impetus to rethink the established formula. Meanwhile, Game Freak continues to try to hold onto its indie routes, focusing on early planning for each game and running out of time for final polish that would prevent bugs. After all, if there's one thing the Pokemon franchise is known for, it's bugs.