"As a software engineer, it's wild to me that the developers themselves are getting so much flak when this is obviously a product management problem"

Bet I'm going to regret wading into this argument.I had this thought while walking through the academy. It and the hub city are this HUGE extravagant set piece but they're both so empty. None of the buildings have interiors and the school doesn't even have hallways! And coming at this from a software development perspective, it's clear that they're cutting corners to meet deadlines, but why like this? Because the first thing that I'd advocate for is like... making the school smaller so that you don't have to spend as much time filling it with stuff, and so the performance issues aren't so obvious? But that's not what they did, because Game Freak, at some level, doesn't fully control what goes into their games. I'm willing to bet so many design decisions are made at the Pokemon Company level so that the new generation can be aligned across all lines of business. So they say, "Paldea has this giant Pokemon Hogwarts", and the people who make the TCG and the show and the merchandise are like "cool, we'll center that in our content". But then if Game Freak is like, "well that is a completely unreasonable scope for the timeline you've given us to make this video game", TPC just says "tough nuts", because failure to release the game means at least like 3 other companies now have no sellable product. They've set this cadence where everything has to release at once, INTERNATIONALLY in like ten different languages, so if one thing gets delayed everything has to be delayed, and from the perspective of the money people that cannot happen.It's the same thing with the sandwich minigame. It's so detailed, they modeled so many, like, conventional groceries, and for what? Why didn't they use that time to make the game perform adequately? Probably because the anime episodes centered around Ash making sandwiches with Koraidon are already in post-production and TPC has decided that this is something they can't drop the ball on. So Game Freak is forced to make this tradeoff of, well if the performance is bad it might sell worse, but if there's no sandwich minigame then the TCG cards full of sandwich art are going to make NO SENSE.What these games really need is for all parties involved to budget more time and workers for their software products YEARS in advance. That, or actually let the software people dictate the pace of their work. But I don't think they're going to ever do that because they can just crunch their team of devs to death to put out something economically adaquate. I bet the devs are pulling their hair out at being forced to release software that's so subpar because they clearly put so much work into this game, it just wasn't nearly enough work relative the unreasonable scope set for them by the brand-level creative team.This is just my hypothesis for what it's worth. But I feel like this whole situation makes more sense if you think of Pokemon's brand less like Call of Duty and more like Sanrio, because that's who they're really competing with.EDIT: Figuring out who is to blame isn't important and not my point here. It's just that in a huge corporation like this decisions are made from the top down not the bottom up and I don't think everyone gets that. via /r/pokemon https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemon/comments/z1319n/as_a_software_engineer_its_wild_to_me_that_the/?utm_source=ifttt