If you haven’t finished catching ’em all in Pokémon X or Y, you only have a few months left to do so before Nintendo unleashes even monsters for your 3DS.
The publisher is throwing out a quick attack of new Pokémon games for fans of the series. It announced this morning that Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire will come out for the 3DS in November of this year. These are updated versions of the Ruby and Sapphire Pokémon releases that debuted on the Game Boy Advance in 2003. Pokémon is one of Nintendo’s most-popular and lucrative franchises, and it needs all of the money it can get after reporting a $229 million loss today for its fiscal year.
With the release of Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, this marks the third year in a row that Nintendo will release a new Pokémon. In 2012, the company launched Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 for the Nintendo DS, and X and Y hit in October. Publishers like Activision and Electronic Arts have built strong businesses with annual releases in the same property, and it looks like Nintendo wants to give that a shot.
Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire will likely feature upgraded visuals based on the 3D engine developer Game Freak employed in X and Y, which was the first fully 3D entry in the long-lived series. X and Y also featured detailed battle animations that will likely spruce up the familiar combat in Alpha and Omega.
Pokémon games are always among the best-selling releases whenever Nintendo releases a set. That’s likely one of the major factors prompting the company to release more games in the series only about 13 months after the X and Y.
Nintendo is hemorrhaging cash as its Wii U home console flounders. The hardware manufacturer has only sold 6.17 million Wii U systems since its debut in November 2012. In the last quarter, it only sold 310,000 units of the console to customers. This is devastating the Japanese game maker’s financials.
The 3DS, while a bright spot compared to the Wii U, is not making up the difference, but another new Pokémon could help.
