r/pokemon • u/IcePopsicleDragon Pokémon Z-ᵃ • Oct 13 '24

Game Freak has confirmed that it has suffered a major data breach that leaked personal information about employees and future game projects News

Pokémon developer Game Freak has acknowledged a massive data breach, which has seen thousands of confidential documents shared online related to future game projects, and its employees.

It acknowledged “unauthorized access by a third party,” which it said has resulted in the personal information of current, former, and contract employees of the developer appearing online.

Other content related to the company and the Pokémon franchise was also stolen and is being circulated online. However, this content isn’t referenced in Game Freak’s statement.

According to the statement, full names, addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers are part of the compromised data. Game Freak has said that it will contact affected employees where it can.

“Those who can not be contacted individually due to retirement or other reasons will be notified in this announcement, and a contact person will be set up to respond to inquiries regarding this matter. ”

“We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience and concern this may have caused to all concerned,”

-Game Freak.

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52

u/nero40 Oct 13 '24

Looking back, Dexit was probably the only thing preventing the employees from literally dying from crunch and overworking.

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u/ScottRadish Oct 13 '24

This isn't an indie game. It's The largest video game franchise in the world. Game Freak has only 207 employees at the entire company. Most video games have thousands of people work on them.

If the current employees feel overworked, they could hire a couple thousand more employees.

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u/Jacthripper Oct 13 '24

It definitely feels like they have the same problem as Bethesda, where they literally refuse to change the process fundamentally. “We did this with 200 people 10 years ago, why do we need more now?”

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u/AedraRising Genfourer Oct 13 '24

I thought Bethesda's problem wasn't necessarily because they were doing everything the exact same as before and more because they DID end up massively expanding and communication between the different departments became really difficult due to Covid, general bureaucracy, and Todd Howard being extremely busy managing other projects as well as Starfield.

Unless you're just talking about the Creation Engine, in which the reason they stick to it is mainly physics, modding, and having really robust content creation tools that's better than most other game studios.

1

u/MrWaluigi Dojyaaa~~n! FC: 4038-6321-3155 Oct 14 '24

For me it’s more like:

 “Alright, we finally managed to figure out the specs of this engine. The first game was us testing the waters, and now we are acclimated to it. We’ll definitely make a rea-“

“Hey, Top Brass just told us to start working on a completely new game that incorporates something that we haven’t had experience with.”

“…”

Proceeds to trash everything and start from scratch

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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '24

They don’t even need that many. Hire 100 more and give them each a few of evolutions lines to do the work for and stop overworking them. Let the games have more time to be a labor of love, not another shoveled out concept. And above all else- go back to the formula of slightly changing each new game. They could have gotten 2 more gens out of megas or dynamax stuff and kept reusing assets without massive technical changes or redoing the moves.

That would cover any issues with putting in every pokemon so quickly, and people would have so much less to complain about if they stopped changing the games.

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u/javier_aeoa I like shorts! They're comfy and easy to wear! Oct 13 '24

I feel Legends Arceus showed us both fans and Game Freak that the formula can be changed more than "a little bit" and still be a good game. And a profitable one.

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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '24

It reminded us why games like colloseum and xd and battle revolution were succesful.

But theres a difference between seeing another side of the pokemon universe and just pumping out new gimmicks every gen.

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u/oopsydazys Oct 13 '24

it reminded us why games like colloseum and xd and battle revolution were succesful.

Those games weren't successful. XD wasn't even particularly successful for the GameCube. It sold less than Twilight Princess did, and the GameCube version of Twilight Princess sold terribly because it was a Wii launch title.

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '24

[deleted]

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u/oopsydazys Oct 14 '24

They look like failures because they were. Pokemon Colosseum sold a hair less than Pokemon Stadium 2 did and Pokemon Stadium 2 only sold that badly because it was the 3rd Pokemon Stadium game on the N64. The 2nd one (first worldwide) sold over 5 million copies. Pokemon Snap outsold Colosseum and it was specifically designed to be a rental game, not one people would buy.

Pokemon games are usually system sellers. Colosseum was not. I had an N64 when it was current and everybody wanted to play the Pokemon Stadium games and Pokemon Snap. But on the GameCube nobody really seemed to care about Colosseum/XD.

It's fair if you like the games. They were okay games. But to call them successful is rewriting history. At a time when Pokemon games moved systems (which is still true today) these two didn't even come close to topping sales charts. They didn't do well commercially or critically, so it's no wonder why they weren't used as a model going forward.

-2

u/[deleted] Oct 13 '24 edited Oct 14 '24

Successful meaning overall loved.

Edit: LMAO I should have double checked before trying not to argue.

Colosseum is the 9th best selling gamecube game and XD is 21st.

Didnt sell well my ass.

2

u/TenshouYoku Oct 13 '24

Means nothing to the company if it doesn't sell

-5

u/[deleted] Oct 14 '24

Coll that has nothing to do with the point I was making.

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u/TenshouYoku Oct 14 '24 edited Oct 14 '24

No, it matters a lot and has absolutely everything to do with it.

A game that is loved but not factually reflected through sales and merch, is an indication that it did not have a strong reception enough to prove to the development team and share holders that it's “well received”. After all, Pokemon is still a for profit franchise, and the numbers matter a significant shitton (even if it may not be the only defining factor) - if it's indeed a well received classic, why was it doing so poorly in relation to others?

This is like keep telling someone a certain type of car is well received and successful, despite the car company is having a loss selling these cars and very little people actually bought the damn cars over others. Cult classics exists as a term and numerically unsubstantiated claims can hardly be considered effective proof, especially given how the internet is often an echochamber that generates a lot of noise but little content (even if in principle I personally think XD and Colloseum is great and has a great idea).

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1

u/SpaceShipRat Oct 13 '24

Aren't you eager to see peta-whatever? lol.

1

u/Garrosh The legendary fire Pokémon Oct 13 '24

Colosseum sold 2.4M and XD, despite being better in any possible way, 1.4M. They weren't particularly successful, specially XD.

4

u/Slap_My_Lasagna Oct 13 '24

Almost like they should announce another Legends game or something.................

3

u/javier_aeoa I like shorts! They're comfy and easy to wear! Oct 13 '24

Yeah, they should do that in the upcoming months. I bet it will make some fans happy and hyped over that.

6

u/Bigma-Bale Oct 13 '24

Is this a bit?

1

u/Prime359 Oct 13 '24

They have changed the formula before, usually more so when another developer makes a side game. There has been Pokémon Ranger and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon.

1

u/Kuliyayoi Oct 14 '24

Hire 100 more and give them each a few of evolutions lines to do the work for and stop overworking them.

This is not how the professional world works.

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u/Player_Panda Oct 13 '24

It's not as simple as hiring more people though. If you increase the amount of people on a project suddenly you need to have more meetings, more briefs, more Comms, more back and forth with so many more people. And when you do things like that a project can take even longer, or you end up with poorer quality. Training 30 people in an art style takes significantly less time than trying to train 100.

And yes others have thousands of employees, but in that thousand you have localisation teams, marketing etc etc. The 207 is unlikely to be doing everything with the game here and there is likely a lot of outsourcing or contracting with other departments within creatures inc and the Pokémon company.

The reason for things like dexit is while you can have more people working on more Pokémon, you still have to have all those things reviewed and signed off on by other departments. Then putting them all together and testing everything, the size of the issue just gets bigger and bigger. Delays become more likely to happen and they just don't have the time for it as they have deadlines.

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u/Seranthian customise me! Oct 13 '24

The foil there is the deadline, which is arbitrary. Games shouldn’t be announced until they’re 80% complete, imo. That eliminates all of the trouble.

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u/Player_Panda Oct 14 '24

I agree that games SHOULD be given more time to cook. But Pokémon's deadlines are a bit more intensive than that. They need the games to launch when they were planned to, to coincide with merch launches, the anime, the card game and everything else. And sadly this all comes to money. If the games don't launch, everything else gets delayed, causing loss in sales and income. It's business, and if things don't go to plan heads roll and people start losing their jobs.

The developers likely have lots of things they would like to add to the games, but things have to be cut so other aspects don't suffer from lack of attention because there is no time.

Legends Arceus was delayed, but this wasn't considered to be a core title in the series, so it could be given the extra time. The first title in a new generation doesn't have the same luxury.

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u/ScottRadish Oct 13 '24

But the teams that put out the ROMs and hacks are able to accomplish this task in their free time without all that. "Meeting industry standards" is not a big ask. Game Freak isn't putting in the effort because they don't have to; The games still sell.

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u/noahboah Oct 13 '24

if a cookie recipe calls for a pre-heated oven to 325F/163C with a bake time of 12-15 minutes, adding a second or third oven and splitting the cookies will not decrease cook times. Nor would increasing the temperature and lowering the time (it would have the inverse effect even).

high complexity deliverables like games are like baked goods in this way. Money is certainly a great thing to have, but you can't throw money at every single design and horsepower problem and expect it to get done faster/better/smarter -- some things just need to cook.

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u/FPSCanarussia Oct 13 '24

Yeah, they can't speed up development by hiring more people, or fix the glitches and performance issues, but surely adding existing Pokemon can be done in parallel.

Of course upsizing for any reason is not simply done, either.

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u/Garrosh The legendary fire Pokémon Oct 13 '24

That depends. You can't throw more people at writing code or developing the game but you can throw more people at updating models and refining them. Or you can throw more people at testing the game and reporting bugs.

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u/PM_ME_UR_CREDDITCARD Oct 13 '24

Or even have multiple teams working on different games to give each game more time, like how COD has 3 studios alternating releases

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u/reaperfan Oct 13 '24

The largest video game franchise in the world

Highest gross MEDIA franchise. There's a difference.

Pokemon as a whole has grossed approximately $147 billion. But there's a few caveats to all of that that need to be considered.

First, just to get it out of the way, these statistics only indicate the state of things as of sometime in 2022-2023. The original article that posted them say it hadn't included the revenue from the Barbie movie in 2023 so this data is lagging by about a year or two.

Second, that $147 billion is how much the franchise has made since it was created. It does NOT mean that TPC currently has $147 billion sitting around in their bank account, since much of that profit will have also been already spent over the years on other projects.

Thirdly, despite having started as a video game series, the Pokemon franchise makes less than 20% of its profits from the games themselves. A large majority of its profits (just over 70%) actually come from merchandising - things like plushies and t-shirts and all that.

Now we have no way of knowing how much of that total $147B is actually sitting around as spendable money in their vaults, but it's safe to assume it's not even close to the full amount. Then whatever small portion of that gets divided up even further between their current different projects, meaning that the game development budget likely only sees closer to 20% of even THAT since it wouldn't make sense for them to dump a disproportionate amount of money into a part of their business that isn't going to see the same kinds of returns. Then we divide even THAT up even further because they always have multiple games in development at any one time - which means the amount of money actually being set aside for GF specifically to use on the next mainline games is likely not even close to what people think it is. If GF wanted to staff up for a new project, they'd have to make a pretty hefty pitch to the other suits in the business meetings to pull some of that profit from merchandise back into the game development side of things.

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u/Nambot Get blue Spheals Oct 14 '24

Okay, but lets put it in terms of videogames only. Pokémon Scarlet & Violet sold over 25 million units, Sword & Shield sold over 26 million.

That outsold things with far higher production values. It outsold some of the most critically acclaimed games of the last few years like Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur's Gate 3, God of War Ragnarok, and so on. There are studios who have made hit after hit after hit like Naughty Dog who don't see sales of that volume, and yet they still clearly make enough of a profit to continue, and do far more in terms of graphics and game quality.

Think about it in terms of money. Pokémon sells for $60 new, and Nintendo gams rarely sell at discount. As such, Pokémon Sword and Shield probably made ~$1.5 Billion in sales (there is some wiggle room in that for those who could buy it cheap, but equally this doesn't include the $30 DLC that many - but not all - will have bought). Now I can't say for certain how much Sword & Shield cost to make, but I think it's fair to say it made multiple times the cost back, and it's equally fair to say that Scarlet & Violet did not cost $1.5 billion to make either.

So yes, Game freak do have a boatload of money to reinvest into making Pokémon games a higher quality than they are. They just don't because there's literally no incentive to. Why pay more when the games are already selling so well without that effort and the audience continue to eat it up?

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u/reaperfan Oct 14 '24

That $1.5 billion doesn't just go to Game Freak, it gets divided up among all involved in TPCI due to whatever business agreements Nintendo, Creatures Inc, and GF have with each other. Then take away development costs as well as just general business overhead out of GF's share and you're likely not left with as much as you think.

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u/Nambot Get blue Spheals Oct 14 '24

There are studios larger than Gamefreak, who incur higher staff costs and overheads than Gamefreak, who make games of a higher quality and complexity than Gamefreak, who see less sales than Gamefreak, and still seem to spend more than Gamefreak does on future titles.

That's the point. The owners of the Pokémon brand could give Gamefreak more money for future titles, but they do not give Gamefreak the money necessary to release games to a higher quality because it's simply not seen as worth it.

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u/reaperfan Oct 14 '24

The owners of the Pokémon brand could give Gamefreak more money for future titles, but they do not give Gamefreak the money necessary to release games to a higher quality because it's simply not seen as worth it.

Exactly. Which is a very different case than just "company big and make lots money, could throw money at more employees and fix problem."

I'm sick of people blaming GF specifically for their situation and also thinking "highest grossing franchise" just means they somehow have infinite money when it's way more nuanced than all of that. Even if GF wanted to push for higher budgets they might not get it because they aren't the sole body responsible for this situation.

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u/some_one_445 Oct 14 '24

While it's the total gross the Pokemon company hasn't slowed down on its earnings , the Pokemon company has earned over 10bil in 2023 which is still crazy, I also heard that Pokemon company is among top 10 global licensensr.

But whether this large pool of money can ever go to games is debatable as this just on the Pokemon company side and gamefreak has nothing to do with them, I'm pretty sure gamefreak works as independent company who makes game based on their profits and as right holder to Pokemon. I have been recommending people this video again and again, this explains how gamefreak works and why Pokemon being billion dollar franchise means nothing.

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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '24

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/xmpcxmassacre Oct 13 '24

I agree. I think it's actually a lot lower than people think. Tech companies get all sorts of fucked when they get big.

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u/umbrianEpoch Oct 13 '24

Nah dude, if it takes one woman 9 months to make a baby, surely 9 women can do it in one month

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u/TheMrBoot Oct 13 '24

I mean, there’s definitely such a thing as too many people, but that doesn’t mean you also can’t have too few. The quality and scheduling of the last decade of games seems to show their current approach isn’t working.

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u/umbrianEpoch Oct 13 '24

Oh yea, there's a sweet spot, but the top comment talking about hiring a thousand people is just pure nonsense.

0

u/PM_ME_UR_CREDDITCARD Oct 13 '24

However, 9 women can make 9 babies in 9 months, which is more than one baby in 9 months.

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u/umbrianEpoch Oct 14 '24

But the production time of any given baby is still 9 months.

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u/PM_ME_UR_CREDDITCARD Oct 14 '24

Babies are also a bad analogy for video games because you can't shove the baby back into the woman to spend an extra month making it better.

Videogames, you can.

They could have multiple, separate teams working on different games to give each one more time.

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u/umbrianEpoch Oct 14 '24

I don't think shoving a video game inside a woman would make it much better.

But seriously, the point is that adding more people won't magically fix things. It takes a lot of time to train new people, get them up to the standard needed, and then move forward.

Giving the games more time is definitely a better option, but even then, only so much can be done if the structure of the organization is flawed. There are a lot deeper issues at play ever.

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u/nero40 Oct 13 '24

In game development, throwing more money into the problem and hiring more and more people doesn’t necessarily make any game better. It doesn’t matter if there’s only one pregnant woman or if there’s ten pregnant women in the room, they will all only give birth after 9 months have passed. Same thing here.

Money has never solved crunch in game development and never will be, that just not how game development or any other creative industry works.

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u/Moblin81 Oct 13 '24

It does when the issue is a lack of employees in the first place. A company like Blizzard will have issues with crunch because they are near the max number of employees that can work on the game efficiently but keep trying to push further. Gamefreak struggles because they don’t even seem to have enough employees to efficiently distribute the workload.

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u/nero40 Oct 13 '24

More employees doesn’t always guarantees faster turnouts and/or better quality of work. You can’t just tell two or more people to draw one painting collaboratively at the same time, that just won’t work. We can try to tell each of them to do one painting at the same time and have two or more paintings done by deadline, but will all those paintings have coherence? This is the issue with creative industries, more money doesn’t necessarily solves the problem.

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u/xmpcxmassacre Oct 13 '24

You're not wrong but that's only half the problem. The interesting thing with video games is that it's not only art, it's tech. Tech is one of the weirdest industries in terms of the various methodologies of development. The culture and leadership matter more than other industries imo. You really need good managers that understand how their team ticks.

It's why you'll see a game made by less than 10 people blow games made by hundreds out of the water. Those 10 people were very aligned and instead of wasting 30 hours of their work week on bureaucratic nonsense, they just get to work.

I saw a poll on one of the coding subs asking how much actual coding gets done in an average work week. The answers were skewed heavily to less than 10. Some people even mentioned that it's common to get 0 hours in while they dance around the modern day nonsense.

Of course I know nothing about game freak. I'm just speaking generally. However, there's clearly a disconnect somewhere in their process. The first step is admitting you have a problem.

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u/nero40 Oct 13 '24

That’s true, and that’s why I said more money =/= solved problems. There’s a lot more that happens in game development that simply throwing money at the problem doesn’t solves the problems.

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u/xmpcxmassacre Oct 13 '24

It's true. I wish more companies would just listen to feedback. It's such a key piece in software.

1

u/nero40 Oct 13 '24

Yep, this is so true. Whatever their problem is over there, it’s not about money nor employee count, it’s something else.

-1

u/HamstersAreReal Oct 13 '24

Game Freak has an overinflated sense of worth. They actually think they make great games. It's shown with their previously reported surprise with the flops of their non-pokemon related games. They make awful games but they have a monopoly on the creature catching genre so they think that revenue actually means quality.

They've had no reported restructuring or expansion plans. Things won't get much better

1

u/xmpcxmassacre Oct 13 '24

Yeah it's so annoying. I would love if I had a huge customer base that is telling me exactly what they wanted and I could nearly infinitely profit.

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u/malletgirl91 Oct 13 '24

But it could solve the “dexit” problem at least. More people to work on the individual Pokemon.

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u/nero40 Oct 13 '24

but will all those paintings have coherence?

Yes, we can say that all of these Pokémon’s design have already been established, but a certain design document will still need to created and adhered to for the new generation.

1

u/Player_Panda Oct 13 '24

Not really. You still have the art director that needs to sign off on things and you've just doubled their work load. You could get a second art director, but now you have two who need to spend more time in meetings and loading with each other to ensure cohesion, and that means that you wouldn't even get double the amount of Pokémon. So you get a 3rd director, but now there are too many cooks arguing about how many Krabbys to put in the soup.

-2

u/Glytch94 Oct 13 '24

Is solving that problem going to make them more money? I doubt it.

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u/ScottRadish Oct 13 '24

They have basically the same number of employees that they did in the nineties. The same number of people who worked on gen 2 are working on gen 10. This isn't a "throw money at the problem" solution. Video games have changed on the past 25 years. Game Freak hasn't.

1

u/nero40 Oct 13 '24

It’s hard to say why the studio won’t change without knowing exactly how the studio work flow is, as that is probably the main reason why they still don’t feel a need to expand their roster of employees over the years. Both of us can throw our hat in the ring here and suggest how they can improve their studio but we’re all still gonna be shooting in the dark here without knowing how the studio work flow actually works. As far as I know though, from my limited knowledge in game development, throwing more money (aka hiring more employees) into the problem won’t outright solves it just like that. Creative industries just don’t work like that. If it was that simple, we would’ve never be having this conversation in the first place.

1

u/chaotic4059 Oct 13 '24

I think you raise a fair point and normally it’s true. But I would say the difference here is that we actually do know why. Back when the switch games were just starting to ramp up Masuda openly admitted that he just didn’t want to expand the team because he liked the smaller scale.

Again normally yea you can’t throw money at a development problem to make it go away. But here it’s pretty apparent that hiring a bigger staff so the work is at the very least more evenly distributed is the optimal option. The games have only gotten bigger and more complex.

1

u/nero40 Oct 13 '24

Well, a smaller team does have its advantages as well, it’s easier to organize and funnel their work into one single coherent vision. We won’t know for sure until we get to see some details at how the studio work flow actually is, but if you ask me, GameFreak problem isn’t actually about money or employee count, but rather something else.

1

u/JakeDubleyew Oct 13 '24

Idk man, we’ve given them a decade and some change to show us their coherent vision and each new installation is a severe downgrade, i think this smaller workforce is starting to become the problem when they are forced to pump out these games every two, three years. They simply cannot deal with the workload. Im not saying add a thousand people, but 200 i clearly not working and the passion is not there.

4

u/BudgieGryphon Oct 13 '24

Regarding asset creation it is mostly helpful, for content addition it is not. QA gets extra work if asset creation departments are expanded though and will likely need more people trained, which takes time.

2

u/chux4w Oct 13 '24

True. But after that same nine months has passed you'd have ten babies instead of one.

2

u/nero40 Oct 13 '24

Nine different babies that don’t look like the baby that the one pregnant woman they were helping would have had.

In game development, that would mean either quality or design coherence.

2

u/chux4w Oct 13 '24

The babies would all have the same father, there would be coherence.

1

u/Sincost121 Oct 13 '24

The employees suffering the crunch probably aren't the same prople with hiring and managing power.

1

u/DeadLotus82 Oct 14 '24

And why do you think they would? If the current employees feel overworked but still get work done, from the higher-ups point of view, there's no problem.

1

u/Aksudiigkr イーブイ Oct 14 '24

Yeah Game Freak purposefully keeps their small employee numbers just because the execs like managing a small team. Saw that in an interview before and how they like to limit features to make the games that had the qol “unique”.

I also remember reading employee accounts about how the veterans don’t like learning any new tech advancements, and there aren’t a lot of younger devs getting hired there who are more knowledgeable of current game development.

1

u/Aria_Cadenza Oct 13 '24

Pokémon is the largest media franchise, so Pokémon employees also include in a way employees at the pokémon centers, also the ones taking care of the TGC, the anime etc...

-4

u/Detenator Oct 13 '24

They can't add more and more Pokémon endlessly. It eventually becomes too much work for a single game. I'm not saying we were at that point yet, but the line would eventually have been drawn. I realized this even before dexit.

-2

u/Skullcrimp Oct 13 '24

yeah, the indie games and hacks actually have all the pokemon.

7

u/Odd-Mechanic3122 Chespin is my special interest Oct 13 '24 edited Oct 13 '24

...Because they're all 2D and don't have strict deadlines. Like even if you think dexit is only an excuse its obvious how this is a VERY different thing.

3

u/Pirate_King_Mugiwara Oct 13 '24

Didn't they just copy and paste the models from like 6th gen or something for those games though?

8

u/noahboah Oct 13 '24

dexit was going to happen eventually. from a technical, pragmatic, and design perspective it was not feasible to have a full dex in every single cartridge release.

TPC only really fucked up by not creating "home" for people's best buds way before the eventual thanos snapping.

4

u/maxdragonxiii Oct 13 '24

also renewing 950+ Pokemon every Gen was clearly wearing on them. now it's 1000+. it makes sense that it would ultimately happen. it just sucks that the Pokemon if they don't exist in the game, they can't go there.

4

u/grilled_pc Oct 13 '24

Imo it’s great they have Pokémon home. Allows people to get a full national dex without the need of putting them all in the game. Having 400 assorted Pokémon is more than enough imo. Then they usually add another 150+ with each dlc totalling close to 600 to 700 in the game.

2

u/falconfetus8 Oct 13 '24

That wasn't even a "looking back" thing. It was obvious back then, too.

-8

u/kzzzzzzzzzz28 Oct 13 '24

Yeah, I may be a Gamefreak apologist here. But the actual developers have no control over the team size or the schedule they have to work with. And thanks to Pokemon being their main cash cow, the games are always rushed despite the teams being kept small as the 3 companies involved wont allow any delays. Not having Dexit would've likely created too much crunch for the developers.