The fact that regional forms are easier to make doesn't mean much. As I said before, Game Freak creates new Pokémon every generation with no problem. Therefore, they're not even required to create regional forms if they don't want to. They can stick with making new Pokémon every generation as they always do. As I said before, time constraints shouldn't be a problem if they designed new Pokémon well before Pokémon games are set to release. If they already can do that every generation, then it shouldn't be a problem for them at all now.
Seeing as you're ignoring all the reasons I'm talking about and just saying "They can do it, they just don't want to" without any significant argument to support that, despite me explaining a lot of reasons why that's probably not as simple as "just make more", I'll just stop responding to this part.
All I'll say is that I find it highly unlikely that the current workflow of Pokemon, a billion dollar franchise that creates a ridiculous amount of artistic assets in a yearly / biyearly basis can be solved with this one simple trick.
It's better for the franchise to create new Pokémon instead of giving old Pokémon new lazy designs.
That's highly debatable, and not at all being reflected in the current sales, which is usually the working metric for business decisions. You're certainly welcome to your opinion, but unless you can substantiate that, this is a "I think that X / No, I think Y" situation.
Current data says that newer generations, which have lower amounts of new Pokemon and have regional forms are selling well enough that there isn't enough business pressure to force the creation of new designs.
Also, Pokémon doesn't have to worry about what is more marketable. Pokémon is a billion-dollar franchise. People are going to buy Pokémon games no matter what and the regional forms are not the main reason that people buy these games. In fact, based on my recent experiences online, it's not uncommon for Pokémon fans to hate these regional forms.
True, but I wasn't talking about the games because they're not the most relevant moneymaker to Pokémon nowadays. They're there more as an excuse to introduce new Pokémon and characters for merchandise, which is the true breadwinner of the franchise, making about 4 times more money than the videogames.
And there's where marketability comes in, if you do a new design there's a higher chance people won't like it, but if you do "Vulpix but white" you're almost guanteed to get a bunch of plushies and shirts and other merch because of nostalgia and recognizability. For every "joke" regional form, you have other well liked forms that work well enough.
When Alolan Exeggutor was first revealed, many Pokémon fans thought it was a joke, for example. The same thing with the blond weave wearing Dugtrio. People aren't picking up the games because of that.
They still bought the game, or at least a big enough group of people got the game to show that regional forms aren't making them lose orders either. So it's a safe conclusion that new designs are qualifying features: you need enough to make people wanna buy, but after you reach a certain threshold adding more doesn't necessarily help.
It's fine if you don't like them, but the game decisions are made to a wide, heterogeneous group. No one decision will please everybody, for example, I have seen multiple people in this very forums saying "There are enough Pokémon, we shouldn't have any new designs", I've seen lot of people saying "The new designs are just kinda bad. Gen ${insert_number_they're_nostalgic_for_here} was the last good generation of designs."
If whatever you're gonna do will get criticized anyways, the only reason to avoid the easier thing is if that will hurt the bottom line in some way, which isn't happening right now, either because they're doing other things right enough to compensate for that or because the wider target audience that isn't emotionally invested enough to care about it.
As a completely subjective sidenote, a big part of "these forms look silly" come across to me as being fueled largely by nostalgia. Living in a tropical country myself, I have failed to see why making one Pokémon that's based on a tree, based on another tree is silly. Palm / coconut trees are giant and thin, that's just something they do. And if they used that idea to make a new Pokemon, a lot of those same people who are very invested in Gen I and saying it's silly right now, would come out and say "that's just a copy of Exeggutor, Pokemon designs nowadays are so uninspired".
That extra space could have been used for some new original Pokémon. Many people are also responding negatively to the Pokémon Legends Arceus leaks that revealed the regional forms in that game as well.
And unless that backlash results in less profit, it doesn't really matter. There was a big backlash for SwSh, but we know the sales turned out great.
That's been my point the entire time: decisions in big companies are decided by the capitalist reasoning of "what's good for the bottom line" instead of some sense of artistic integrity or whatever.
As for the backlash, I get that. I just personally don't understand why the Unova games received so much backlash in the first place. Those games were so well-done and arguably the best in the entire series, and many fans agree with that statement as well.
Now, they agree now. It's important to keep in mind that this consensus is very much a new thing.
But the backlash depends on a lot of historical reasons and it's not exactly appropriate for this thread. There is a thread in Previous Generations where people discussed this backlash, and I even posted some reasons there if this wasn't a rhetorical question.
Regardless, backlash from a vocal minority doesn't mean anything. Just because they received such backlash doesn't mean that they should continue focusing on regional forms. The majority of Pokémon fans would always appreciate new, original Pokémon being created in every single generation. Not everybody can be pleased. There would always be a few fans that don't like something about Pokémon. Not every Pokémon fan likes every design.
If there's one thing I've seen in my time is that groups of fans notoriously don't know what they want. I guarantee you that if that they did a region without any kind of regional forms, mega evolutions, Gmax forms, etc. you'd have people complaining that there isn't anything like that the game, and you'd get other people complaining that some of the new designs should have been one of those things.
As an example, when Gen V was released, some people were saying that Alomomola should have been a Luvdisc evolution. After Gen VII was released, some people were saying that Alomomola should have been Unovan Luvdisc.
I sincerely disagree with your statement that fans would always appreciate new designs.
However, Game Freak put a lot more effort into generation V for the simple fact that they actually took the time to design several new Pokémon and create a different Pokémon experience. The designs also weren't lazy as well, nor they did create bad-looking versions of previously existing Pokémon.
That's highly debatable, wasn't widely considered to be the case until recently (if that has changed at all, I've seen the BW renaissance being done mostly in regards to the game mechanics, not necessarily to the designs) and the very first knee-jerk reaction a big chunk of people had when they first saw Alomomola was "This is a bad-looking copy of Luvdisc."
Since this conversation isn't going anywhere, I'll stop responding and clogging up the thread. We'll have to agree to disagree.
