Pokemon Scarlet and Violet have become the series' best-selling games of all time in Japan, beating out the previous record-holder for the first time in decades.
According to a Famitsu report (for which we're using machine translation), Scarlet and Violet have sold over 8.3 million copies between them in Japan, which means they've officially sold more than the original Pokemon Red and Green (since Japan's game was Green rather than Blue).
Until this moment, those original games held the record for Japan's best-selling Pokemon games, and given just how much of a phenomenon Pokemon was when it first arrived, that's no mean feat.
It's worth noting that these sales figures do only apply to Japan, so Scarlet and Violet may well not be the best-selling Pokemon games elsewhere in the world.
However, given the huge success of the Nintendo Switch and the sky-high sales numbers of Scarlet and Violet around the world, I wouldn't be surprised if the newest games were also the best-selling in other regions.
Generally speaking, mainline Pokemon games are released every three years or so, and since Scarlet and Violet launched in 2022, we can perhaps expect an announcement regarding the next major Pokemon games soon.
It's likely, though, that Nintendo will wait until the successor to the Switch is announced. We're expecting news on that front sometime before April 2025, so the new Pokemon games may well be revealed alongside the console.
That announcement seems especially likely to coincide with the Switch 2's given that Pokemon Scarlet and Violet met with criticism at launch regarding their lackluster performance on Switch.
They're not the only games in that particular firing line, either. It seems that devs may be avoiding releasing games on the Switch owing to its aging internals, so a successor would presumably improve things on that front, not just for Pokemon but across the board.
Still, since it's been confirmed that the Nintendo Switch 2 (or whatever the console ends up being called) will be backwards compatible, perhaps there'll be some sort of performance boost for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet on that front. We can but hope.
You can check out Pokemon Scarlet and Violet right now on Nintendo Switch. A DLC pack, The Treasure of Area Zero, which comprises two extra story episodes, is also available now.
