Ah yes my favorite piece of corporate fanfiction "the glorified marketing agency that is explicitly subservient to Game Freak is somehow controlling them like evil overlords because... they just are ok!!!"
If Game Freak was at the mercy of these people megas would've never been taken out and they would've been forced to make new ones
If anyone in this fanfiction is "forcing" its will upon gamefreak let's be real it's probably Nintendo, the one who actually owns the IP and likely approves/denies final game pitches.
But you know what's sadder than evil corporate fanfic? Corporate Truths!
Did You Know Gaming (or Dr. Lava, rather, if anyone remembers him he's the one pushing to translate and spread various magazine articles and stuff like the 90s pokedex) actually did a lot of digging while looking for information on Z Version and its like....
god
OK so you remember that period in the Gen 6 era where GameFreak put out those smaller games, most of which got later ported elsewhere like to Phones and stuff? Harmoknight, Pocket Horse Jockey, Tembo? You might, like me, remember those as happening where members of GameFreak would pitch a game and if 2 board members liked it they would give the OK to do it. You might also, like me, have thought oh that was just a side thing and they set up the little project for that purpose.
No no! Interviews in japan literally stated that this "Gear Project" (as it was called) was a major initiative in the company. It's been known they had 2 development teams for a while, that typically alternated, but during this era Team
2 was the Pokemon team and Team
1 was go Gear Projects and that wasn't coincidence they literally said Gear Project was their primary focus. They wanted to continue develop new games and IP and try to find and encourage something that can stand up alongside pokemon [my editor's note: i imagine they said this in a way of like "a more general, but distinct successes" and less "a new multibillion dollar franchise"]
And if you're sharply sucking air through your teeth now, just wait!
While the games reviewed...fine, mostly, they really didn't catch on at all despite their attempts at it. DYKG doesn't linger on it but you can probably drag a line from "3ds exclusive download titles" to "Tembo isn't on any Nintendo Platforms" and "porting those games to mobile and PC" all as an attempt, an yattempt, to reach a wider audience and get more interest (DYKG DOES bring up a quote that they quote "Always targeted" other platforms with Gear Project though which....). Likewise with the later Giga Wrecker (PC only ,I believe), and Little Town hero (ported after the Switch version came out), which were also remnants of this Project.
I think Masuda straight up said in Famitsu that like, not even 1 out o 50 of the people who bought Pokemon bought their other games. They really
did try to push their games too, they even started a gamefreak-specific youtube account to just sort of detail things about their games (in addition to stuff about Pokemon, of course) and so on. That quote where he mentions the 1 out of 50 ends with just like...a really sad plea? To please subscribe to their youtube channel, and watch the videos.
They stopped uploading videos entirely 2 years ago and at their peak had about 40k subscribers. It was a japanese only channel and there WAS a pandemic (though video content like that would probably excel in a pandemic...),but, it really seems it wasn't doing what they wanted it to do.
Needless to say they also wound up scrapping various Gear Project titles and sounds like they just dropped the idea entirely by this point after the failure of GigaWrecker and especially Little Town Hero (there's a reason people just stopped talking about the game and if they did talk about it, it was not kind...)
if I might further put in an editor's note from me: I remember a quote from one of LTH's directors, when talking about working with Toby Fox on the soundtrack, akin to "We worry people will [talk about/like] the soundtrack more than the game!" and in the moment it just feels like a joke about working with a popular composer but like......was it really tho.............