[Kyrio]

Pokémon isn't a Nintendo first-party title, it's not developed internally and often considered third-party by the company, as they only own part of it. But nitpicking aside, the titles developed by Nintendo look and perform fine, they're often some of the most advanced titles on the platform, so I'm not sure where you got that idea.

[noirscape]

The ownership of Pokemon is an interesting little rabbit hole in general. The property technically isn't owned by Game Freak or Nintendo. Its instead owned by a holding company called quite literally "The Pokemon Company inc."

TPCi is owned in equal parts by Nintendo, Game Freak and somehow the manufacturers of the card game, Creatures Inc.

So you'd think Nintendo owns 33% of the Pokemon IP through TCPi, except they also have a significant amount of stock (not a majority of shares) in Game Freak. The exact amount isn't known but the result is that Nintendo most likely controls TCPi entirely.

Also, just to head it off - the anime (the other most popular Pokemon product after the video games and card games) is made by Studio OLM (which also did the 1997 Berserk adaptation as well as a truckload of other anime based on Japanese video games) and they have no controlling stake in TCPi whatsoever.

[cubefox]

> So you'd think Nintendo owns 33% of the Pokemon IP through TCPi, except they also have a significant amount of stock (not a majority of shares) in Game Freak. The exact amount isn't known but the result is that Nintendo most likely controls TCPi entirely.

I think we have good evidence that Nintendo has very little control over the development of Pokémon games. They do not at all adhere to their quality standards. My assumption is that they agreed that their shares each get them specific benefits:

- Nintendo gets platform exclusivity for the games,

- Creatures gets exclusivity for any merchandise,

- Game Freak gets creative control over game design.

[goosedragons]

Creatures Inc. has been involved with Pokemon since the beginning, prior to the introduction of the card game. Their name is present on the boxes, carts and in game of the original 1.0 release of Pokemon Red and Green in 1996. I believe they helped out with some of the development a few months before Red/Green went out the door.

[robopsychology]

I don't think The Pokemon Company is a holding company, I applied to a software engineering role there a while back

[fooqux]

If you go to pokemon.com and scroll to the bottom, you'll see:

©2023 Pokémon. ©1995 - 2023 Nintendo/Creatures Inc./GAME FREAK inc. TM, ®Nintendo.

Aside from all the stuff you mentioned, they directly own at least some parts of it.