Pokemon Sword and Shield Break A Record
Photo Credit: GameFreak
Pokemon Sword and Shield launched on November 15th and according to Nintendo of America they sold over 6 Million Copies world wide in it’s first weekend. Sword and Shield is the first game in the core RPG series since Pokemon Sun and Moon on the Nintendo 3DS which launched 3 years ago on November 18th in 2016. Sword and Shield is also the first entry in the main series to launch on the Switch.
As the 8th Generation, Sword and Shield’s new Pokemon brought the total number of pocket monsters above 1,000 and is the first game to not feature the ability to port over all of your previous Pokemon from the older games. As a result of this it sparked a controversy players are referring to as “Dexit”. Sword and Shield feature a total of 400 Pokemon which means over 500 Pokemon are not available in the game. Developer have said the reason for leaving so many out was development time. It was too much to recode and remodel all the Pokemon from the older games in order to put them into Sword and Shield. Part of the “Dexit” movement claimed that GameFreak lied about this when images of alleged models data-mined from Sword and Shield were compared to those in Sun and Moon. This game rise to the #GameFreakLied campaign on Twitter.
Despite all this controversy and bad press Pokemon Sword and Shield has become the fastest selling game in the history of the franchise. 2 Million of those copies sold were in the United States itself. Nintendo of America also noted that to date the core RPG series since the launch of Pokemon Red and Blue in 1996 has sold over 240 Million Copies. Even with all the naysayers it seems that Pokemon is as popular as ever. A few things could have contributed to the increased success of Sword and Shield. Since the colossal success of Pokemon GO! and the Detective Pikacha Movie the franchise has become even more widely accepted in the mainstream. Plus, with the success of the Switch and it’s online store Sword and Shield is one of the first Pokemon games easily bought via direct download.
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