I still think if copyright laws weren’t so oppressive, 50 years would be fair (And still a huge improvement from the current situation).

Maybe have it in tiers or something? First 10 years: full copyright - until 30: similar products allowed, but no blatant reproduction - until 50: reproduction allowed as long as it’s not for-profit - post 50: public domain?

If we’re talking PvP, battling has constantly evolved through new abilities, even without gimmicks the way the game is played changed a lot through the years.

In single player they also changed a lot of stuff since gen 4, although the positive changes were mostly in gen 5/6 and the later ones like wild areas and the switch to “””open world””” were… not as well received.

However Pokemon came out in 96, that’s 28 years. There’s been very little innovation in their games since.

First, not really, there’s been a LOT of innovation in Pokémon, as much as people want to deny it.

And second, 28 years is really not that much. We’re not in the Disney realm of copyright-hogging, I think 50 years is a fair amount of time. The issue is that it’s often way too broad: it should protect only extremely blatant copies (i.e. the guy who literally rereleased Pokémon Yellow as a mobile game), not concepts or general mechanics. Palworld has a completely different gameplay from any Pokémon game so far, and (most of) the creatures are distinct enough. That should suffice to make it rightfully exist (maybe removing the 4/5 Pals that are absolute ripoffs, sure).

It’s the studio Nintendo chose as lead developer for BDSP.

I can’t think of a single first-party Nintendo game that’s released riddled with bugs in recent memory

Literally Pokémon. SwSh, SV and BDSP are all a bug-ridden mess. You will probably find more bugs playing SV for an hour than in all gen 3-6 games together.

Although yeah, it’s a (huge) anomaly and the rest of the first-party games are extremely polished. It just sucks to be a Pokémon fan in the 2020s.