I actually feel more strongly about the fact that they outright lied about things than the fact that said things happened in the first place. They could have just admitted outright that they did not anticipate things to go as wrong as they did, but not only did they not admit this, but 1) they lied about why they did what they did, and 2) they confirmed that this will be their new way of doings things moving forward. This is what truly is a deal breaker for me.

One single botched game is not the end of the world, but the promise of a soon-to-be-botched franchise for seemingly no good reason (which also happens to be the highest selling media in the world) is a whole other story.

Whenever this stuff comes up I'm reminded of that interview a while back where one of the higher ups at Gamefreak admitted that they thought the Switch would flop and they were honestly surprised that it was a runaway hit.

This gives me the impression that Gamefreak was completely unprepared to move the Pokemon franchise to a home console, and the higher ups at Gamefreak held off on shifting the gears they needed to shift to make Pokemon a proper home system title out of some misplaced expectation that the Switch would sputter out and die.

Now if this impression is correct might actually have legitimate excuses explaining the problems with Sword and Shield, though that may be a stretch as it has been a couple of years and I don't know how hard or it is to shift a Japanese company's internal bureaucracies.

It's just too bad that Gamefreak feels the need to be dishonest in order to justify Sword and Shield's shortcomings, as this casts doubts on their ability to deliver a future product that won't have similar shortcomings.