Yes, I am jumping into this late. I'm just gonna respond to the "current" discussion at hand:
Game Freak & ILCA: Business Relations & Partnership Lessons
I'm not gonna spin any theories of whether the moderate success, development difficulties (which I don't think we have deep details on aside the happened?), lukewarm reception & critical criticism of BDSP has done anything between Game Freak and ILCA. Sadly, nowadays that's sorta business as usual.
If I'm curious of anything is if the experience of letting another company develop a main series Pokemon game has taught GF anything. Before we can ask that though, there's two major we need to know:
1. Who decided for it to stick close to a 1:1 remake.
2. Who decided on the art style.
"Um, duh, GF". Okay, that's my bias talking, and I do feel GF would be the main pusher for both with ILCA having little say except for maybe places where they could do some additions & changes. "The Underground is kind of pointless without the multiplayer, can we replace it with a semi-Wild Area"? "You won't let up change the teams, but can we change around the movesets as long as they're legal"? "Post game in the Battle Tower can we just make super hard teams"?
Though there's still the possibility that ILCA, if it didn't push for it, was more than happy with the restriction. 1:1 Remake means there's a clear script to follow for the main game and the art style is on the surface looks simple and can give them some freedom to show expressions.
This is an important distinction because if it was mainly GF than the limits they were pushing may have added extra difficulty upon ILCA to make the product. If they were to do this again with another remake, let's say Gen Vs, if they learned a lesson it would be to not be too strict and let the developer has more freedom with the story & art style (and on ILCA's front, or whatever developer they get to do the remake, maybe try to push back for said more freedom). BUT if it was ILCA being totally cool with everything yet still having development problems, well for GF this might discourage them for doing this again or at the very least partnering with a smaller studio like ILCA (and ILCA may feel the restrictions of making a main series Pokemon game isn't for them).
This is, of course, if GF cares about anything other than the money made. If they did only see this as a quick cash grab (at most a necessary side thing needed to be done to clear a path for their ideal project: Legends Arceus), then as long as it made them a decent amount of money they don't care. It would be said if this is the case, but I can totally see GF thinking of themselves as the only people who can make Pokemon games *shoves all fanmade games under a carpet in a giant lump* and using BDSP as "proof" even if its proof they (possibly) caused themselves; aka a "setting them up to fail" scenario.
Like all things in life the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle and the likely result is GF likely not wanting to do this often so any lesson learned is mute, at least until a similar circumstance happens again and someone decides to see what things went wrong last time they had another developer make a main series game.
