Golden monsters. How much do the Japanese earn from Pokémon?

25 August 20239 months ago babelfish

The Pokémon brand, exploited not only for the development of video games, but also in films, comics, animated series and gimmicks of various kinds, is worth about 80 billion dollars and continues to grow

When, in the early 90s, the self-taught developer Satoshi Tajiri proposed to Nintendo the idea for a video game in which some little monsters gave each other a thrashing, he certainly could not have imagined having the proverbial goose that lays eggs on his hands. gold. Nintendo, probably, had instead understood it, because the company, at the time still led with an iron fist by Hiroshi Yamauchi and therefore very little open to open innovation, immediately welcomed it by relaunching the stake: it would have financed the development and the distribution of not one but the first three video games: Pokémon Blue, Pokémon Red, and Pokémon Green . Because the little monsters made by putting together a handful of pixels had the possibility of going viral like the stickers: it was better to create multiple editions of the same game, each with different critters to encourage exchanges between users.

POKéMON, BIRTH OF A MYTH

Three titles that had their raison d'etre in Tajiri's childhood. A very modest childhood, lived in the suburbs of Tokyo, where the immense Japanese megalopolis gave way to some glimpses of rural landscape.

In the seventies, the future father of Pikachu & co wandered around ponds and cultivated fields in search of insects that he caught and made them fight: a rather strange hobby but particularly widespread in the Japanese archipelago, home to beetles capable of reaching considerable dimensions.

In Japan, Pokémon mania is rampant from the first chapters

Then the constant urbanization did the rest: the fields were flooded with cement, the Tajiri house was surrounded by buildings and our boy from via Gluck in Japanese sauce, orphaned of his little friends with shells, antennas and horns, decided to transfer them to the virtual plane.

SUCCESS IN NUMBERS

Luckily for him and for Nintendo. In a few years the Pokémon saga will brilliantly cross the finish line of the third decade. Thirty years during which the very first three episodes, ie those edited directly by Tajiri, have placed something like 47,520,000 copies for GameBoy.

Journalist Patrizio Roversi plays Pokémon in the Nintendo headquarters in an episode of Tourists by chance from the mid-90s

Calculating all the games published in a quarter of a century and a little more, the Pokémon saga has exceeded 440 million copies sold worldwide. On the Pokémon Trading Card Game front, over 43 billion cards have been produced since the mid-1990s.

SALES OF THE LATEST EPISODES FOR SWITCH

A success that shows no sign of diminishing. Even the latest chapters for Nintendo Switch, according to the financial report for the fiscal year 2022/23 of the Kyoto-based software house, are largely responsible for the incredible success of the Japanese hybrid console.

Pokémon Legends: Arceus , released on January 22, sold 14.83 million copies in its first year, while Pokémon Scarlet and Violet sold 22.10 million units in just over four months.

Pokémon have even made it onto the liveries of airliners

To get an idea of the proportions, just think that the other best-selling Nintendo titles, in the same period, were Splatoon 3 , stuck at 10.67 million units sold, and Nintendo Switch Sports , which totaled 9.60 million copies sold.

In short, if along the 4 corners of the globe today there are 125 million Nintendo Switches ( compared to 40 million PlayStation 5s ) as anticipated, it is largely thanks to these funny and colorful little monsters with inexhaustible success.

HOW MUCH DO POKéMON BILL?

Nintendo knows this well, given that thanks to the influx of money that comes from Pokémon it has been able to allow itself a few too many strategic mistakes, especially in the days of the Nintendo 64 and the GameCube, its least sold platforms despite the high quality of the titles. But let's get to the question that interests us most: how much money do Pokémon make?

A lot: 11.6 billion dollars only for licensed products, therefore merchandise and other products connected to the brand. These are the latest figures available, relating to 2022 and show a growth of 36.5% compared to the results recorded in 2021 (8.5 billion dollars), placing it in second place among the fastest growing Japanese companies.

Do you remember Pokémon GO , the smartphone app that gave a boost to the saga, bringing millions of kids, smartphones in hand, to grind dozens and dozens of kilometers in the footsteps of virtual little monsters? Here, that software, despite its free-to-play nature, still has a turnover of more than six billion thanks to in-game micro-transactions, there have been many downloads and enthusiasts willing to spend to become excellent hunters.

Just today, Thursday, August 25, The Pokémon Company International announced that Pokémon Sleep , an app that measures sleep, has exceeded 10 million downloads worldwide since its release in late July 2023 for iOS and Android devices.

In the midst of the pandemic and therefore with millions of people forced home in search of a hobby, The Pokémon Company recorded sales of 1.6 billion dollars. A success that has contributed to further raising the value of the brand, which is now sailing towards 80 billion dollars.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/mostriciattoli-doro-quanto-guadagnano-i-giapponesi-coi-pokemon/ on Fri, 25 Aug 2023 11:27:01 +0000.