Man, I haven't done this in a while. An update for TPC's and Nintendo's expansion activities:
While it's not groundbreaking news, it's still significant because TPC's and Nintendo's plans are mainly in the medium and long term.
Zhuge notes a couple things:
1. "The Pokémon IP is hugely popular in Mainland China, not just through games business but through its toy licensing business and media business." Aka. the anime and related stuff did pretty well there too.
2. "There is no Pokémon game officially released for the Switch in China just yet (so everyone just imports) but they are going through the approval process."
One thing Zhuge doesn't note:
3. Said approval process takes months at least, and in some cases can become Approval Hell (TM). Because the process runs through the Chinese government and the state has over the past few years tightened the approval process. Why? Partly to try and control things, partly because of a Moral Panic surrounding one of Tencent's games back in 2017 (Honor of Kings, Tencent's mobile LoL),
with state-run papers attacking the game. Currently 16 Switch games are approved since December 2019 (ooof) and BotW 1 is in Approval Hell (TM).
Well, anyone who owns a Switch there and is interested in BotW has probably imported it and beaten it (as well as Age of Calamity) so no biggie.
Worth noting that since Zhuge's a consultant whose data Nintendo, SEGA etc. use (
see his firm's website and scroll to the bottom), it's no wonder that he kinda skims over that.
Please tell me the Gundam and Mechagodzilla fight each other.