Yum yum yum! More gacha garbage from my favourite garbage repository, how could one not be happy?!

Pokopia seems to have fixed a lot of the issues i had with Dragon Quest Builders 2 and wouldn't make me wanna rip off my own eyebrows in boredom unlike the aforementioned spiritual predecessor, at least judging from gameplay footage i found on Youtube, since i ain't buying a Switch 2 anytime soon, so it's good that not every Pokémon product that comes out these days is gastric waste (although i do firmly believe the speculations about the game being born as gacha slop initially), so here comes Champions to drag my expectations back to the floor where they rightfully belong. The Showdown killer, allegedly.

The Pokémon Company is never gonna take down Showdown. It's the most well known form of Pokémon content that isn't directly owned by them (that isn't animal porn or in between those 2 weeks where Pokérogue was the most popular thing on the internet), if they really wanted to take action, they could have easily done so years and years ago, with virtually nothing in their way to stop them. Why didn't they, given how many smaller indie projects met such a fate already? That ultimately eludes me, but if i had a theory it's got to do with how they see it internally as a small but dedicated branch of their fanbase whose emotional (and more importantly financial) investment relies on the conjoined investment on Showdown, a platform that is a drop in the bucket within the Pokémon brand, but it's maintained alive at no expense from the company and does theoretically yield indirectly a small but steady source of revenue to not, good enough to not cause any disturbance. I own a Goodra plushie, the evil spell worked on me.

As for the hot question: whether TPC sees Showdown as direct competition or not, now that Champions is around; i can promise you hand on the Bible that they don't. They know the average free-to-play and phone slop consumer is very stupid, very forgiving and easily impressionable. The animations and models they've been recycling for over a decade coated with a cheap paintjob are enough to draw in exactly the kind of fanbase they want.

This is the best iteration of Stadium 3 you could possibly hope for in modern day: gone are the mini-games, the single player content and the custom made graphics, but here's a thing worse than both the rental system from the OG Stadiums and Random Battles from Showdown, because making sure that a game is accessible is more important than making sure it's good.

Let's be clear, Game Freak could have NEVER done something like Showdown, but i think the conversation around this topic needs to be a bit more nuanced than what i've often seen discussed.

A company, no matter how financially predisposed, no matter how talented and sizeable its personnel is, no matter how consumer-oriented their beliefs are, is just not the same as a group of people fucking around in their free time to create something based off of something they like, the responsibilities and perspectives these 2 groups have are just not comparable.

Sure, there's figures of authority in Showdown, mods, admins, programmers, but at the tail end of it there's no one these people have to answer to above Showdown itself. Most companies that aren't working at a loss with the specific purpose of selling off their property to another company don't work like that, and you couldn't realistically expect Game Freak to try and replicate Showdown 1:1 in its simplistic web UI form, they'd have to put together an immensely vast and often underappreciated web of connective tissue to make it all presentable enough as you'd expect from the largest media franchise of all time (not that this has stopped them before, but we're talking theoretically here) plus the considerably higher costs of server maintainance if something like this was exposed to the mainstream, plus how much more pressure is put on the state of the platform if an unpopular decision is made given how much money is at stake.

Shit's different. I'm not defending the way things are, i'm not saying that it couldn't be done if caution was thrown to the wind, i'm just saying that this shit's not as easy as one would think.

That's ultimately the point i wanna leave here, as a palate cleanser for all the negativity i'm so gratuitously spouting: it's not that Game Freak may be too lazy or incompetent or under-budgeted or too constrained by corporate law to have created something like Showdown, whether those things are true or not, but rather that it's just great how such cool thing like Showdown can co-exist with the brand it's building up on. Subscribe to Verlisify for hear more about this heartwarming message.