Pokémon franchise reaches wild historical milestones for games and TCG

Another year, another massive period of sales and growth for the Pokémon franchise. As is business, we have updated figures for two of the brand’s key pillars, which show that the Pokémon video games and Pokémon TCG hit two wild milestones—with even wilder stats to pair with them.

According to The Pokémon Company’s corporate listings, Pokémon-related video games have sold over 480 million units as of March 2024. Through that same period, the company and its partners have printed over 64.8 billion Pokémon TCG cards. For both categories, that is an increase of 10 million units and 11.9 billion cards, respectively, compared to the March 2023 totals. 

That is a sizable increase for each department, but even more mind-boggling is the fact that 11.9 billion Pokémon cards printed over the last year make up for 18 percent of all official TCG printings overall. This shows the continued success of the Pokémon TCG and TPC’s continued persistence in stocking products to combat shortages, scalpers, and resellers. 

Other companies are also taking advantage of the Pokémon TCG’s growth, as GameStop recently announced it was betting big on Pokémon with a new business plan, and eBay continues to see huge success on the Pokémon card market. The latter also just entered a new deal with PSA that will “streamline” selling, grading, and more for card collectors. 

On the video game front, there hasn’t been a major Pokémon game released since Scarlet and Violet dropped in November 2022, and the only spin-off that would count towards sales is Detective Pikachu Returns. That means SV and its DLC carried the franchise’s tracked sales as it inches closer to becoming the second best-selling set of titles in the series. 

Pokémon also maintains its second-place ranking in the best-selling video game franchise of all time with that updated 480 million total units sold, well ahead of Call of Duty’s 400 million units and Grand Theft Auto’s 335 million total. Pokémon trails only the Mario and Tetris franchises, depending on which criteria you check under. 

Mario has a ludicrous 835 million units sold across all games featuring the plumber’s branding. But if you just look at the Super Mario flagship, it actually falls behind Pokémon at 430 million units sold. Tetris, according to multiple sources, can be listed anywhere between 495 to 520 million sales overall if you take into account its paid mobile apps and around 70 million without it, though even that is an outdated total.