Is the supposed backlash of Gen 5 incredibly overblown?

See >b-but it’s below average to aver-
“Average” for Pokemon is still multiple orders of magnitude more successful than practically any other game out there, salesfaggotry is truly the most pathetic phenomenon on Any Forums and that’s saying a lot.

It's not, but it should've been way, WAY more considering the DS' install base at the time of release. Why did BW sell so much less than SwSh on way more popular hardware? It either just flat-out failed or brought in its usual audience and failed to grow it. Either way, it was a failure. It's a guarantee that they were at least expecting it to sell as much as DP, and probably exceed that number. The next mainline title in a series as gargantuan as Pokemon selling less than the previous mainline title is objectively a failure for a series like Pokemon that prints money.

Weren't R4 cards and emulation at their very peak at that time?

see
>b-but it's still way better than any of its competition!
When you're as big as Pokemon you're competing against yourself, and a failure to grow your userbase, let alone actually losing ground, is just that; a failure. This really doesn't reflect on the games themselves in any direct, meaningful way but there's no denying that something went wrong in Gen 5.

Sure, but implying that it was directly responsible for millions of lost sales is at best conjecture and at worst an extremely convenient scapegoat. You could say the same for the Switch, which was cracked open a year and a half before SwSh came out, yet those games still managed to outsell GS. There were so many more DS' in circulation by the time BW came out than when DP were released, I really can't see the math checking out with piracy being the main culprit for BW's missing sales.

Gen 5 is easily the best gen. The only people who don't like it are the same who cry over dexit.

It sold about the same as any other post-Pokemania generation, despite releasing on a system that was already being phased out and had piss-easy piracy.
The backlash was mostly just Internet discourse. Being a "nerd" had become a trend at the time, as had '90s nostalgia, so normalfags decided that Pokemon wasn't gay anymore. They started getting back into it, only to be confused and angry when Pikachu and Charizard didn't appear on screen every two seconds like they remembered from their childhood. Sadly, this is the one and only time that fan outrage was listened to, because the outraged fans were demanding less effort and less new content, and that's always music to Game Freak's ears.

Neither of those are how you used it.

TPC lost money that fiscal year. One of the few times it ever happened. Printing carts that go unsold is not cheap.

>It sold about the same as any other post-Pokemania generation, despite releasing on a system that was already being phased out and had piss-easy piracy.
Saying it's "about the same" conveniently hides the fact that it sold less than RS and DP, the first and only first games in a Gen to sell less than the first games in previous Gens, assuming XY and SM are in a statistical tie. There's really no good excuse for BW selling less than DP when the DS sold over 100 million units worldwide in the four years between those games. The idea that over 100 million people bought a DS and BW somehow lost ground entirely due to piracy is extremely hard to believe.

You're obviously too young to remember how butthurt some people were at the time that Pokemon was still on the DS rather than the 3DS. Between that, the genwunner influx, and the rampant availability of R4 cards, it's a miracle that the sales still didn't change all that much.