Pokémon continues to be one of the biggest media franchises on the planet, and The Pokémon Company’s latest product figures paint a massively successful picture for both the TCG and video game departments.
According to TPC, its partners have produced over 52.9 billion cards in their lifetime, which puts the total cards manufactured between March 2022 and 2023 at a whopping 9.7 billion.
For three years straight, year-over-year production has increased for the Pokémon TCG. Part of that increase over the past year likely came from the official launch of the TCG in mainland China last October with a Simplified Chinese translation.
With the reported figures, that would mean just over 18 percent of all Pokémon TCG products were printed in the last year. However, despite those numbers coming from TPC, there is a bit of pushback on the legitimacy of the totals.
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As mentioned by PokéBeach, the records for these figures seem to be accurate when it comes to the year-over-year changes, but the actual totals may be slightly off since the company did not accurately keep figures prior to 2017—at least to this level. Based on the data PokéBeach has, TPC and its partners produced roughly 1.5 billion cards per year prior to 2019.
That isn’t the only update we received from TPC either, as Pokémon games continue to generate huge sales figures.
In the same period from March 2022 to 2023, all tracked Pokémon video game titles shipped a reported 40 million total copies, which brings the total lifetime sales for the video game portion of the brand to a staggering 480 million units sold.
Even if TPC’s figures are off by a small percentage, the sheer increase in production over the years shows just how big Pokémon has become globally since its initial video game was released in 1996.
