@Dog Why change the award-winning Zelda formula? Why earn $10 million when you can earn $20 million? Why deliver unlikely long-time fan favorite characters into Smash Bros. Ultimate? Why innovate?

There is hunger in Nintendo product owners for a dynamic, adaptable Nintendo, and every time they deliver something new rather than rehash the same old, they break barriers and reach levels of financial and critical success they never could have enjoyed had they stuck to producing more of the same. It is clear that the grid-based 2.5D RPG gameplay formula with ~100 new creatures and an accessory toy peripheral cannot push the series forward any further.

The mainline Pokemon RPG series as an example of revenue has encountered steady year-over-year stagnation in sales despite saturated public exposure and high engagement, and this is not due to any hardware issue or release timeline, as the Nintendo 3DS, the home of the series for the better part of a decade, has enjoyed a sizeable install base for many years — sales of main Pokemon RPGs should be increasing YOY as the user base grows, not shrinking. This stagnation is due to saturation and recycled content. Players who purchased X and Y do not feel there is enough of a new experience in newer titles to warrant new purchases.

Arguably, the most exciting and promising success the Pokemon series has enjoyed since Pokemon X/Y, (which itself was a major change from past entries and benefitted majorly from it) is Pokemon GO, a complete deviation in both gameplay and reception from the norm for this maturing IP, being a mobile title that has become a mainstream social phenomenon while titles like Pokemon Omega Ruby and Ultra Moon stagnate by these same measures. People who hadn't played a Pokemon title since Red and Blue were making Pokemon a part of their lives again twenty years later, and this is not because GO's gameplay is casual, but because it is different and new and provided players with an experience they had wanted since they first picked up a Game Boy: the experience of catching Pokemon in the real world.

As there was when Pokemon GO was released, there is demand today for a less restricted, free-form style Pokemon game, just as there was for the Zelda and Mario series before they too delivered a different experience from their past games. These evergreen titles now account for huge margins of total software sales on the Nintendo Switch. Simply put, it would be a wasted opportunity to fail to capitalize and not make the product people want to play.