Yeah, GameFreak figured out the casino stuff wasn’t a good idea in gen 4 (HeartGold/SoulSilver) and replaced slots with Voltorb Flip outside of Japan, and otherwise closed the game corner in subsequent titles. In Pokémon: Let’s Go (Gen7) the player receives Porygon from a random person instead of needing to grind coins in the casino. Would be interesting to see if they could/would hack in that change.
Former PlayStation exec who left in 2019 before the PS5 launched.
While the writing was on the wall that creativity was leaving the AAA space, PlayStation was still the AAA darling which didn’t really mess up.