Why did Pokken fail? | Bulbagarden
Part of it was the Wii U. The Wii U just sold so poorly that nothing really succeeded that well. But that doesn't quite explain it all, because Nintendo re-released several Wii U titles on Switch and they enjoyed rather dramatic turnarounds. Mario Kart 8 for example, only sold 8.46 million on the Wii U. On the Switch? 57.01 million! Pokken was also re-released on Switch but only went from 1 million to 1.54 million. So the Switch didn't really open up more sales for the game.Another factor might be timing. Pokken Tournament DX released in 2017, which was packed with far more popular games like BotW, Mario Odyssey, the aforementioned Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and Splatoon 2 among other games. Pokken Tournament DX... probably got sent out to die competing against all of that, it's hard not to get utterly buried under those kinds of heavy hitters. So that's probably a factor, 2017 was a rough year to release a game that wasn't in an established, popular series, in a lighter year people might've been more likely to try it.
It could also be a genre issue and maybe there just wasn't enough interest in a fighting game, but Smash Ultimate sold 32.44 million on the Switch, and some other established fighting franchises like Mortal Kombat and Tekken have cracked 10 million (and Street Fighter has come close) so I'm not sure that's it. Maybe Pokken could get there if it sees multiple entires with sustained success, but with it only selling ~1 million I don't think TPC is going to give it another chance.
Really I think it would be much better to have an ARPG spinoff with real time battling and allow you to battle other players as with the main game. That could make for a nice spiritual successor to Pokken that would have wider appeal, since RPG fans and potentially exploration/open world fans depending on the map design would also be interested. I myself am more the exploration/open world type so I'd be more interested in this than Pokken 2, but it's possible they could make a Pokken subseries successful even though it hasn't been yet. But it would need a lot of circumstances to go right for it and it would be risky, so I suspect they won't do it.
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