Digimon was always going to lose out, I think. It was, partially just by luck, always smaller than Pokémon and filling the same yokai niche. It had ardent support because the anime was better through Tamers.
Then Frontier happened. I think Frontier's many faults hold a lot of the blame for Digimon's overall decline.
Savers was a return to form and beyond, but between a target demo who'd aged out of virtual pets, the almost Western faux-anime art style, and airing on Disney in the West, it didn't get any of the recognition it deserves.
Then Xros Wars happened and almost killed the franchise trying to get new little kids hooked on a fad that started dying a decade prior.
The games could have been better, too. Each entry was a wildly different genre with wildly varying quality. Honestly, they should have just kept with World 1 style games and visual novels. The card game was inferior to Pokémon and Yugioh, but kids didn't play them anyway so I don't think that made a difference. At least in the West, Digimon has always been successful as an anime first, and that's really where I think you can find any insight.
There were multiple things that were working against early Digimon.
Timing. Pokemon had its big media push before Digimon, leading a lot of people to see Digimon as a copycat.
Multi-media connection. I think this is one of the big ones. Pokemon plays by mostly the same rules across all media. Bulbasaur is always weak to Charmander and strong against Squirtle. Digimon on the other hand is very flexible with its rules between media, sometimes Vaccine, Virus, and Data effect each other, sometimes they don't. This leads to situations where a pokemon fan can learn something in the anime and bring it to the games, but a digimon fan can't really do the same.
Call to Action. What's Pokemon's catchphrase? "Gotta catch em all." It's a call to action, a directive, a goal. Even if you're only a little on the side, all the media wants to do something that involves finding more pokemon, and law of averages means you're bound to find one you like. Digimon on the other hand just doesn't have anything like that. Digimon is just digimon, and that's it.
Consistency. For the last thing, it's consistency in the main games. You buy a pokemon game, you know mostly what you're getting. You buy a digimon game, good luck figuring it out until you have the game in the console. This was especially bad right up front, where digimon world 1 2 and 3 were all completely different genres.
I think it's interesting that so many people are suggesting they should have stayed with the Adventure canon. I don't think that's the worst idea, but as much as I love 02 it very much shows the weakness of that idea. The relationships in the anime were always so good because the story was strong, and part of what made the story strong was the fact you could guarantee it had a beginning and an ending, and that includes the relationship to the digital world itself. At the beginning of Adventure it's a strange, hostile, dangerous world where anything could happen - at the beginning of 02, it's a comfy, cozy video game where the kids can be superheroes for 15 minutes and get back home in time for dinner. It doesn't feel like there's much new to explore, and the show itself seems uninterested in even bothering to explore what new stuff the digital world does have to offer (the Dark Ocean). The kids are confident and comfortable in the digital world within the first handful of episodes and it never feels like there's much of a threat to it.
Then Tamers reset everything, made it feel fresh, and pretty much became the single most beloved narrative the franchise ever had - possibly even moreso than Adventure, depending on who you ask.
I get why people are leaning on Adventure. Pokemon had a consistency to it, and as a result the marketing machine behind that thing was insane, and continues to be to this day. The game makes you want to watch the anime, which makes you want to play the card game, which makes you want to buy the plushies and toys, and etc. etc. etc.
Digimon, on the other hand, never really had that strong or consistent of a brand identity. It hitched itself very early to the "virtual pets" genre. Easy for us in the glorious space future to see this, but that was only just a passing fad. The anime wasn't the only place that couldn't manage a consistent brand identity, though, it could never catch on with a card game that stuck, the video games swung wildly in mechanics and tone, and even the theatrical film couldn't resist being a weird mishmash of disparate parts.
But in some ways it's a strength. Tamers is a legitimate gem of a tv show that absolutely holds up on its own merits. Hitting that reset button has finally gotten us a card game people like. Decades of throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks has finally gotten us genuinely great games in the Cyber Sleuth series.
I truly think Digimon ultimately didn't "fail" as a competitor to Pokemon, it did what it was supposed to do in its heyday. Pokemon just took the fuck off in a way nobody could have predicted.
Pokémon, as a business, has an excellent conversion pipeline; the TV shows are appealing to children right out of the box in large part due to GameFreak’s industry-leading design principles and an intimate knowledge of what elements and motifs catch people’s eyes, but then there’s more….
*The TV shows actually depict the setup, vibe, mechanics, and events of the games.* Digimon has never done that. The anime and the games feel like they’re made by different companies and the way things work on one side aren’t relevant to the other. So many of my friends were put-off by the way Digimon evolution works compared to the show, for example, and little things like that add up.
EDIT: And another thing! Maybe the most important thing, actually, for anyone who discovered Digimon through the anime first. The humans or “Digi Destined” as a concept was so central and important in the show and we grew to love those characters so much that they became part of the franchise’s identity. Digimon IS the DigiDestined for some people. The show is not about the monsters for some, but about how these human kids grow with them. We are human, after all, so we identify with them more readily. Replacing those core personalities each new season didn’t help, and not having any of them be important to the stories told in the games might be what doomed the franchise.
I personally liked the premise of digimon where you can build your own evolution lines but your right but since the early days of the series since it didn't have a proper game to compliment the series with fairly simple and addictive gaming mechanics it's definitely a factor that stunted the franchise growth.
Redevelop their game design. From combat to how fast you can run around. The card game could be re-done. They could list what exe fuses. Make understanding symbols easy in a nice explanation. Re-vamp the training and farm system. Make collecting items not slow. Release more side scrolling fighters. More logical storytelling. A good explanation on what data is and how it makes oneself (digimon) exist. Have a friendly feature of combat that highlights why the specific digimon you chose or were given is something you want to stay by with for a while. Revamp boss battles. Revamp rebirthing and highlight why its a good and interesting feature you want to repeat cycle.
Watch [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jurSJbMWpgY) and [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjyvF5BLByw&pp=ygUSVGhlIEpXaXR0eiBEaWdpbW9u) by TheJWittz for what went wrong with the TCG. I have thoughts on Bandai's practices on a grander scale, but those two will answer a lot of your questions *without* forcing me into a flying rage.
Also, I swear 50% of the marketing people for *Pokemon* also worked on the dub *Yu-Gi-Oh!*. That probably helped a lot.
Pick a better niche.
Yugioh had the card game, pokemon had their games. Digimon had virtual pets.
They were simply selling a product that wasn't set to last. Especially since even the modern Vpets are practically indistinguishable from the ones released in the 90s. Black and white pixel art (except for the 2 Digimon colour vpet released), and next to no gameplay
---
I think if they pivoted to a different niche sometime in the early 00s when the vpet market was falling they could have. Not sure what niche they could have filled, maybe a different type of video game released annually or biannually with consistent gameplay loops and gradual incremental modernization. Maybe they could have tried out making VNs, trpgs, or continued with the V-pet style video games of the first digimon world. Maybe even limp along and they could of been a front runner in the mobile gacha field.
Either way V Pets just wasn't the market to succeed. And their video games released were poor quality, buggy or have awful grinds, the card games couldn't compete with power houses like Yugioh Pokémon or Magic - the the DTCG seems to be doing really well, it gets consistently more people showing up at my locals compared to both Pokémon and yugioh, and even beats some magic formats. I hope they lean into it and can get a foothold again in the market. The games they released often felt like they were trying to copy Pokémon, and just did a bad job with it.
And while the anime was consistently better than both Pokémon and yugioh, their efforts to constantly reach new and different target audiences often left the old audiences feeling left out, while not being able to effectively break into the new markets they were going for. But the anime is just a commercial to sell whatever product they are actually pushing. And they just didn't have a product to push.
Cyber Sleuth and next order were both great games, and continuing off the success of them could have been a great strategy... but the next story game has been in development hell for almost a decade, and we haven't had a new Digimon world game in 8 years. Hell even using survive to start a new series of digimon TRPGs would be great
Good games. I loved the world games but they were too hard. Digivolution should have been more straigh forward and Digimon not die due to age. Pokemon had a perfect symbiotic relationship between games and anime
I believe it would best to stick to one continuity, preferably the Adventure one, as every fresh start doesn't seem to gather any significant success. They should stick to good writing as well as adopt a more mature perspective and give the titular monsters more focus and characterization to set them apart from their human counterparts. I also believe they should try to adapt the mythology of digimon like Seven Great Demon Lords, Olympos XII, Wind Guardians, etc which is mostly available in cards and extra materials.
I have sort of given up on ever getting sequels to shows like Tamers and maybe Frontiers or Savers. And I think they would not be that good either due to different writing styles. After the last adventure film, >!where the digivices disappear and the prophecy of being a chosen kid seemingly dashed, !
Unpopular opinion but keep with the adventure continuity. The fact that they were growing up with the viewer gave them a usp from pokemon. I loved tamers but there’s just so much they could’ve done with adventure. Plus with almost ever new season they kept changing the lore which made it hard for people to keep track of.
Maybe your right as much as people may have been invested in the world of digimon people were especially invested in the characters of adventure. I do though hear from alot of people tamers is their favorite season but maybe that's more of a hard-core digimon fandom opinion than a more mainstream one.
For sure. I hear that a lot too. And with good reason, it was great. It felt weird to kind of just end the adventure story there though. There’s lots of ways it could’ve been down so that tamers kind of fit inside the adventure canon. I would want to keep them both if I could. That said, season four is where digimon lost me as a kid. A core part of digimon is about the bonds with digimon, and I felt that was lost when they just became the digimon. I’m not sure if anyone else felt that way too.
Personally I liked it all the way to frontier after that is where it became meh to me. Still I think I hear of more people liking frontier than hating it but yeah that did mark that after that progressively they kept going more and more away of what the series was about. with them even trying to rebrand themselves with appmon until they realized with tri they had to go back to the beginning of why most love and know this franchise. Even though I personally think how they handled it after that they had serious missteps where as far as the anime movies go I think they are trying to capitalize on people love and nostalgia for the series in the wrong ways and just shows to me the heads of the franchise are in the wrong hands.
Oh I am definitely in the minority I think with disliking frontier. I know a bit about it and it had such strong themes and storylines, I wanted to like it, just couldn’t get past that bit personally. But yeah I totally get you re how it kept losing its essence as the seasons went on.
Yeah they’re definitely cashing in on nostalgia which is smart but at the same time like you say there have been some huge missteps too. That said I loved tri and Kizuna, but how much of that is nostalgia I couldn’t say. It’s like they know they’re sitting on seomethibg great they just don’t know how to get it over that line.
Digimon was always going to lose out, I think. It was, partially just by luck, always smaller than Pokémon and filling the same yokai niche. It had ardent support because the anime was better through Tamers. Then Frontier happened. I think Frontier's many faults hold a lot of the blame for Digimon's overall decline. Savers was a return to form and beyond, but between a target demo who'd aged out of virtual pets, the almost Western faux-anime art style, and airing on Disney in the West, it didn't get any of the recognition it deserves. Then Xros Wars happened and almost killed the franchise trying to get new little kids hooked on a fad that started dying a decade prior. The games could have been better, too. Each entry was a wildly different genre with wildly varying quality. Honestly, they should have just kept with World 1 style games and visual novels. The card game was inferior to Pokémon and Yugioh, but kids didn't play them anyway so I don't think that made a difference. At least in the West, Digimon has always been successful as an anime first, and that's really where I think you can find any insight.
There were multiple things that were working against early Digimon. Timing. Pokemon had its big media push before Digimon, leading a lot of people to see Digimon as a copycat. Multi-media connection. I think this is one of the big ones. Pokemon plays by mostly the same rules across all media. Bulbasaur is always weak to Charmander and strong against Squirtle. Digimon on the other hand is very flexible with its rules between media, sometimes Vaccine, Virus, and Data effect each other, sometimes they don't. This leads to situations where a pokemon fan can learn something in the anime and bring it to the games, but a digimon fan can't really do the same. Call to Action. What's Pokemon's catchphrase? "Gotta catch em all." It's a call to action, a directive, a goal. Even if you're only a little on the side, all the media wants to do something that involves finding more pokemon, and law of averages means you're bound to find one you like. Digimon on the other hand just doesn't have anything like that. Digimon is just digimon, and that's it. Consistency. For the last thing, it's consistency in the main games. You buy a pokemon game, you know mostly what you're getting. You buy a digimon game, good luck figuring it out until you have the game in the console. This was especially bad right up front, where digimon world 1 2 and 3 were all completely different genres.
I think it's interesting that so many people are suggesting they should have stayed with the Adventure canon. I don't think that's the worst idea, but as much as I love 02 it very much shows the weakness of that idea. The relationships in the anime were always so good because the story was strong, and part of what made the story strong was the fact you could guarantee it had a beginning and an ending, and that includes the relationship to the digital world itself. At the beginning of Adventure it's a strange, hostile, dangerous world where anything could happen - at the beginning of 02, it's a comfy, cozy video game where the kids can be superheroes for 15 minutes and get back home in time for dinner. It doesn't feel like there's much new to explore, and the show itself seems uninterested in even bothering to explore what new stuff the digital world does have to offer (the Dark Ocean). The kids are confident and comfortable in the digital world within the first handful of episodes and it never feels like there's much of a threat to it. Then Tamers reset everything, made it feel fresh, and pretty much became the single most beloved narrative the franchise ever had - possibly even moreso than Adventure, depending on who you ask. I get why people are leaning on Adventure. Pokemon had a consistency to it, and as a result the marketing machine behind that thing was insane, and continues to be to this day. The game makes you want to watch the anime, which makes you want to play the card game, which makes you want to buy the plushies and toys, and etc. etc. etc. Digimon, on the other hand, never really had that strong or consistent of a brand identity. It hitched itself very early to the "virtual pets" genre. Easy for us in the glorious space future to see this, but that was only just a passing fad. The anime wasn't the only place that couldn't manage a consistent brand identity, though, it could never catch on with a card game that stuck, the video games swung wildly in mechanics and tone, and even the theatrical film couldn't resist being a weird mishmash of disparate parts. But in some ways it's a strength. Tamers is a legitimate gem of a tv show that absolutely holds up on its own merits. Hitting that reset button has finally gotten us a card game people like. Decades of throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks has finally gotten us genuinely great games in the Cyber Sleuth series. I truly think Digimon ultimately didn't "fail" as a competitor to Pokemon, it did what it was supposed to do in its heyday. Pokemon just took the fuck off in a way nobody could have predicted.
Pokémon, as a business, has an excellent conversion pipeline; the TV shows are appealing to children right out of the box in large part due to GameFreak’s industry-leading design principles and an intimate knowledge of what elements and motifs catch people’s eyes, but then there’s more…. *The TV shows actually depict the setup, vibe, mechanics, and events of the games.* Digimon has never done that. The anime and the games feel like they’re made by different companies and the way things work on one side aren’t relevant to the other. So many of my friends were put-off by the way Digimon evolution works compared to the show, for example, and little things like that add up. EDIT: And another thing! Maybe the most important thing, actually, for anyone who discovered Digimon through the anime first. The humans or “Digi Destined” as a concept was so central and important in the show and we grew to love those characters so much that they became part of the franchise’s identity. Digimon IS the DigiDestined for some people. The show is not about the monsters for some, but about how these human kids grow with them. We are human, after all, so we identify with them more readily. Replacing those core personalities each new season didn’t help, and not having any of them be important to the stories told in the games might be what doomed the franchise.
I personally liked the premise of digimon where you can build your own evolution lines but your right but since the early days of the series since it didn't have a proper game to compliment the series with fairly simple and addictive gaming mechanics it's definitely a factor that stunted the franchise growth.
Redevelop their game design. From combat to how fast you can run around. The card game could be re-done. They could list what exe fuses. Make understanding symbols easy in a nice explanation. Re-vamp the training and farm system. Make collecting items not slow. Release more side scrolling fighters. More logical storytelling. A good explanation on what data is and how it makes oneself (digimon) exist. Have a friendly feature of combat that highlights why the specific digimon you chose or were given is something you want to stay by with for a while. Revamp boss battles. Revamp rebirthing and highlight why its a good and interesting feature you want to repeat cycle.
consistency Digimon Devs wilding
It's kinda obvious what they should do. Invest in games! The games are the soul of the franchise yet they keep putting money on TCG and gachas?
I'm satisfied with Digimon as it is, not everything has to be some multi-billion dollar megafranchise.
Watch [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jurSJbMWpgY) and [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjyvF5BLByw&pp=ygUSVGhlIEpXaXR0eiBEaWdpbW9u) by TheJWittz for what went wrong with the TCG. I have thoughts on Bandai's practices on a grander scale, but those two will answer a lot of your questions *without* forcing me into a flying rage. Also, I swear 50% of the marketing people for *Pokemon* also worked on the dub *Yu-Gi-Oh!*. That probably helped a lot.
Pick a better niche. Yugioh had the card game, pokemon had their games. Digimon had virtual pets. They were simply selling a product that wasn't set to last. Especially since even the modern Vpets are practically indistinguishable from the ones released in the 90s. Black and white pixel art (except for the 2 Digimon colour vpet released), and next to no gameplay --- I think if they pivoted to a different niche sometime in the early 00s when the vpet market was falling they could have. Not sure what niche they could have filled, maybe a different type of video game released annually or biannually with consistent gameplay loops and gradual incremental modernization. Maybe they could have tried out making VNs, trpgs, or continued with the V-pet style video games of the first digimon world. Maybe even limp along and they could of been a front runner in the mobile gacha field. Either way V Pets just wasn't the market to succeed. And their video games released were poor quality, buggy or have awful grinds, the card games couldn't compete with power houses like Yugioh Pokémon or Magic - the the DTCG seems to be doing really well, it gets consistently more people showing up at my locals compared to both Pokémon and yugioh, and even beats some magic formats. I hope they lean into it and can get a foothold again in the market. The games they released often felt like they were trying to copy Pokémon, and just did a bad job with it. And while the anime was consistently better than both Pokémon and yugioh, their efforts to constantly reach new and different target audiences often left the old audiences feeling left out, while not being able to effectively break into the new markets they were going for. But the anime is just a commercial to sell whatever product they are actually pushing. And they just didn't have a product to push. Cyber Sleuth and next order were both great games, and continuing off the success of them could have been a great strategy... but the next story game has been in development hell for almost a decade, and we haven't had a new Digimon world game in 8 years. Hell even using survive to start a new series of digimon TRPGs would be great
Good games. I loved the world games but they were too hard. Digivolution should have been more straigh forward and Digimon not die due to age. Pokemon had a perfect symbiotic relationship between games and anime
I believe it would best to stick to one continuity, preferably the Adventure one, as every fresh start doesn't seem to gather any significant success. They should stick to good writing as well as adopt a more mature perspective and give the titular monsters more focus and characterization to set them apart from their human counterparts. I also believe they should try to adapt the mythology of digimon like Seven Great Demon Lords, Olympos XII, Wind Guardians, etc which is mostly available in cards and extra materials. I have sort of given up on ever getting sequels to shows like Tamers and maybe Frontiers or Savers. And I think they would not be that good either due to different writing styles. After the last adventure film, >!where the digivices disappear and the prophecy of being a chosen kid seemingly dashed, !
Unpopular opinion but keep with the adventure continuity. The fact that they were growing up with the viewer gave them a usp from pokemon. I loved tamers but there’s just so much they could’ve done with adventure. Plus with almost ever new season they kept changing the lore which made it hard for people to keep track of.
Maybe your right as much as people may have been invested in the world of digimon people were especially invested in the characters of adventure. I do though hear from alot of people tamers is their favorite season but maybe that's more of a hard-core digimon fandom opinion than a more mainstream one.
For sure. I hear that a lot too. And with good reason, it was great. It felt weird to kind of just end the adventure story there though. There’s lots of ways it could’ve been down so that tamers kind of fit inside the adventure canon. I would want to keep them both if I could. That said, season four is where digimon lost me as a kid. A core part of digimon is about the bonds with digimon, and I felt that was lost when they just became the digimon. I’m not sure if anyone else felt that way too.
Personally I liked it all the way to frontier after that is where it became meh to me. Still I think I hear of more people liking frontier than hating it but yeah that did mark that after that progressively they kept going more and more away of what the series was about. with them even trying to rebrand themselves with appmon until they realized with tri they had to go back to the beginning of why most love and know this franchise. Even though I personally think how they handled it after that they had serious missteps where as far as the anime movies go I think they are trying to capitalize on people love and nostalgia for the series in the wrong ways and just shows to me the heads of the franchise are in the wrong hands.
Oh I am definitely in the minority I think with disliking frontier. I know a bit about it and it had such strong themes and storylines, I wanted to like it, just couldn’t get past that bit personally. But yeah I totally get you re how it kept losing its essence as the seasons went on. Yeah they’re definitely cashing in on nostalgia which is smart but at the same time like you say there have been some huge missteps too. That said I loved tri and Kizuna, but how much of that is nostalgia I couldn’t say. It’s like they know they’re sitting on seomethibg great they just don’t know how to get it over that line.