You're being too optimistic so allow me to doom.
Sword and Shield are the second best-selling games right behind the original Red and Blue, and Scarlet and Violet aren't far behind. If anything, the controversy over Dexit caused a Streissand effect and ballooned their popularity.
You can absolutely rely on idiot consoomers, just look at the sales numbers of the yearly EA sports games, the gacha shit and the microtransaction-infested AAA games. Actual fans are a minority, most people who buy Pokemon play it for an afternoon and then do something else, or they're kids who don't care about the quality of the games and a decade from now will be calling them hidden gems and classics. If you want to play good Pokemon games, stick to fangames or return to the old stuff, I still play HeartGold.
That's true, but you're missing the point: People who play yearly EA Sports titles or 2K ones are already sports fans, so they will buy these titles regardless because there is little competition and this is what interests them. People play COD every year because it is familiar to them and because other shooters like Halo and Battlefield shit the bed. Pokemon similarly has little competition, however you have to look at who actually buys these games. Little kids? They aren't really interested in Pokemon, they would rather watch streamers play the games, play fortnite or play some shitty gatcha on their phones.
Who is left then, the dwindling amount of old fans? Trannies, who historically do not actually purchase products they support? Coomers who openly admit they don't actually play the games but only jack off to porn? Even Japanese fans are being turned off, and they're the true bloodline of the franchise, always have been.
Without a new fanbase to put down their roots and become life-long consoomers, you mostly depend on the aging fanbase who is already somewhat aware of the franchise to some extent. Your average consoomer isn't going to buy the DLCs, plushies, trading cards ect which all makes more money than the actual games, and that will impact the bottom line. The high number of game sales is a bit of a misnomer: it is a short term profit that will inevitably end up with much smaller profit margin than if they bothered to make a decent product that was universally praised even by outsiders. That's how you build a cult following, not just sell shit because you know it will sell on the brand name alone.
This is a bubble and it will burst. You are absolutely correct that there really is no point in playing any of the newer titles.
Voice acting literally adds nothing, modern voice acting is garbage enough to detract from what is on screen. Adding voice acting would hamper/reduce what content they can put into the already barebones games.
How daft do you have to be to listen to a character clearly giving a speech, moving their mouth but not actually saying anything? How would actual voice acting, which other games that precede even the original 1996 RBG games had, take away from the experience? Next you will tell me that having more pokemon would detract from the experience too because Gamefreak would not have time to polish up these wonderful animations that are in the newer games.
Pokemon is the biggest entertainment franchise in the world, they can do whatever they want and they have the funds for it as well. You might as well start arguing that Disney and Star Wars are small indie productions done straight from someone's garage and you should not expect much of them.
Man, Gamefreak fans are something else.
