I think it would tarnish a lot of games.
Pokemon gets away with it because of the fanboys that still persist to this day and the fact that it targets children, who don't know any better. It's incredibly manipulative and put simply a cash grab.
The honest truth is that if you want social features in your game, encourage them. Make them easier and enjoyable by playing off of the aspects that only social activities can bring. You don't, however, enforce social activity, especially by restricting content and game features. It makes the game a chore and warrants poor game design. They don't have to make it better because the main draw is the grind of catching all of the pokemon. But the problem with that is the inherently poor choice of making it impossible to get all pokemon without finding dozens of people who have the ones you need, or pay absolutely monstrous amounts of money to get them and transfer them between games.
The pokemon games have lost interest with me because of the cash grab mentality and the fact that the design has become incredibly samey and stagnant over the years. The adaptations it has made are FAR too small and spread out. It's RPG design is borderline archaic. I only played the recent Y version because it was free from a code that I got. And unfortunately it was the exact same experience I remember from 4-5 years ago when I initially quit.
Pokemon gets away with it because of the fanboys that still persist to this day and the fact that it targets children, who don't know any better. It's incredibly manipulative and put simply a cash grab.
The honest truth is that if you want social features in your game, encourage them. Make them easier and enjoyable by playing off of the aspects that only social activities can bring. You don't, however, enforce social activity, especially by restricting content and game features. It makes the game a chore and warrants poor game design. They don't have to make it better because the main draw is the grind of catching all of the pokemon. But the problem with that is the inherently poor choice of making it impossible to get all pokemon without finding dozens of people who have the ones you need, or pay absolutely monstrous amounts of money to get them and transfer them between games.
The pokemon games have lost interest with me because of the cash grab mentality and the fact that the design has become incredibly samey and stagnant over the years. The adaptations it has made are FAR too small and spread out. It's RPG design is borderline archaic. I only played the recent Y version because it was free from a code that I got. And unfortunately it was the exact same experience I remember from 4-5 years ago when I initially quit.