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NEWS: Yo-kai Watch Franchise's Last Retail Store Closes on February 24

One of the reasons why Yo-kai Watch never caught on outside of Japan (and France and Italy to some extent) was the way the toy line was handled. Hasbro had the most abysmal marketing I have ever seen for any non-American toy line. I've seen plenty of commercials for the games on the internet, movie screen, and TV. But, I didn't see a single commercial for the toy line. At all! (PLEASE let me know, otherwise.) As a result, the line was quickly eclipsed by the likes of PAW Patrol and Frozen in toy isles.

Another reason it did so poorly in North America is because of how Disney handled the dub. They tried so hard to please hardcore Otaku and execs at Level-5 that it suffered an identity crisis. Was it a 4Kids-style dub, or was it faithful to the original Japanese version? It wasn't clear. The biggest nail in the coffin was that it aired on Disney , a station that not a lot of people have or watch. Had the Yo-kai Watch TV series aired on the regular Disney Channel, it might have had a chance.

It also streamed on Netflix, where it was...pretty darn confusing.
Maybe I'll get around to streaming a second episode sometime.

The licensors looked at the marketing and said "It's already the Next Pokemon over there, and WE'VE got it!" and thought lightning would immediately strike twice for them with no other necessary expenditure of effort on their part...Much like Disney thought would happen for Princess Mononoke.
But Pokemon had a simple non-cultural concept that already had a clear definition of what goal our hero was after, what game he had to play, and how his cute franchise-sidekick could help. And Pikachu was a much easier character to explain than trying to fit the Japanese concept of yokai into a cute Japan-free Western idiom, especially on kids-TV that doesn't like mention of even non-scary ghosts.
Not to mention, American kids were already familiar with Ash and Pikachu's storyline from the Nintendo game, and thought they were watching a Nintendo series, not a Japanese-marketing series.

And that's not assuming that the Pokemon-clone game series hadn't already been Western-marketed into the ground by the time Yu-Gi-Oh faded.