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Pokemon is owned by GameFreak, Creatures Inc and Nintendo. Roughly split in thirds.
However, Nintendo also owns an undisclosed amount of Creatures Inc and I think parts of GameFreak, making them the majority holder of Pokemon as a whole.
GameFreak does release other games on different platforms. Notably, they will release Beast of Reincarnation on everything but the Switch 2 this year.
Nintendo wants you to buy a Switch 2. Exclusive games like Pokemon mean that you probably eventually will.
big daddy N makes more money not selling on other consoles.
Because Nintendo are anticompetitive and want to increase the sales to their console by only releasing titles to it.
Because Nintendo never figured out Blast Processing. Crucial in developing on most platforms …
Nintendo reserves the exclusives rights most likely. It’s a system seller.
Nintendo.
At this point, the ONLY reason to buy Nintendo is exclusives (that cannot be emulated). But they make it pretty easy to not buy their stuff anymore.
They are exclusively for Nintendo’s consoles, and it owns a third of the Pokemon company. Simple.
Nintendo owns part of The Pokémon Company.
Hopefully, this question opens the eyes of OP to the world of closed ecosystems.
Nintendo
Nintendon’t
Nintendo has determined it’s not a benefit to their business model and they own a third of the Pokémon Company. Their new competitive game is coming to mobile phones in a few months though which is a pretty big change.
why else would people pay Nintendo for inferior hardware?
Because of control.
If Nintendo released on PC, you’d never buy it again. They couldn’t sell a new version on the newest Nintendo console and make you pay for it again.
If they released on PS5, it might be backwards compatible with PS6 and you wouldn’t buy it when it’s re-released again.
Also it cuts into their profits. Valve and Sony charge something like 30% which means either Nintendo takes a cut or they increase price on the customer. Neither works out in their favor. Whereas when they release on their own console, they don’t have to pay any of those fees.
On a practical level for the customer, it does make it easier to manage and ensure quality. Their developers only have to account for one system which means much less bugs and less time for patches when needed. When your team has 5 different platforms to develop for, you risk more unique bugs and versions and also slower time to release bug patches. Same also happens for releases for new content which is slower for both DLC and brand new releases. But when it’s just the one system, the releases come much faster. Also no delays because of Sony or Valve wanting to poke around before approving for their storefront. Nintendo has full control over when the game is released.
Same reason why Mario and Zelda aren’t on those platforms.
It’s my understanding that those games are wholly owned by Nintendo, whereas Pokemon is only partially owned.
The two parts that manage the video game side are Nintendo (whose interest it is to keep Pokemon exclusive) and Game Freak (whose main publisher is Nintendo and who very much needs Nintendo’s cooperation to stay alive) have little to no interest in expanding the games to other platforms. And considering Nintendo was the publisher of the Pokemon games before the Pokemon company even existed they might’ve snuck into some joint venture agreement or IP agreement or whatever that Nintendo gets the final word on what platform the games are released on.
So them having only partial ownership of the Pokemon company doesn’t mean they can’t have full control over where the games get released.
Partially owned still counts.
