The Pokémon Company has revealed that it sold an absolutely mind-blowing 3.7 billion Pokémon cards during the fiscal year 2020-2021.
As reported by Serebii's Joe Merrick, the figure takes the total number of Pokémon cards sold worldwide to 34.1 billion, and also means that 10.8% of all-time TCG sales came during that one year. The sudden jump is likely down to a number of factors, although the widely reported rise in value of older cards and the crazy scalper scenes we've seen over the past few months will no doubt have had a strong impact.
Back in February, The Pokémon Company acknowledged what it described as "very high demand" for new card packs in a public notice, promising to print more to ensure everyone could get their hands on them. Naturally, with more cards available at retail, the fewer opportunities there are for scalpers to capitalise on low stock, and TCG fans have seemingly been feeling a little more optimistic about the state of the game in recent weeks.
Serebii also reveals that The Pokémon Company shifted 12 million video games over that same time period, bringing the lifetime video game sales total to 380 million.
[source twitter.com, via twitter.com]
Comments 16
11% of all Pokemon cards ever sold in history were sold last fiscal year.
"Serebii also reveals that The Pokémon Company shifted 12 million video games over that same time period..."
Sales of all the mainline Pokemon games on Switch + 3DS + NDS is just under 6 million, so that means just over 6 million copies of Pokemon spin-offs were sold last fiscal year.
95% were bought by 30+ year old men, opening packs on YouTube?
How many were people storming shops and online stores grabbing all the packs and trying to sell them at inflated prices on eBay?
And fans think they can make a dent in the company that has spent the pandemic making record money on a video game normally requiring you to go outside and a physical game normally requiring you to mingle with other people.
When you grow up you realise that your Pokémon cards exist in the space between real money and Bitcoin.
Logan Paul really messed the TCG up for the worse.
Opened the floodgates to scalpers and people buying the cards en-masse just for a profit.
@EliteXeos to be fair the game has always encouraged price gouging and hyper inflation.
I've got a few decks worth a couple of hundred pound each because of a handful cards in them.
One of my wife's decks cost a small fortune to build, she will only play with Full Art cards if available and wanted an exclusive fairy deck - took ages chasing down 4 x FA Gardevoir and FA M Gardevoir EX cards along with Eevee and Sylveon.
@Mr-Fuggles777
Oh for sure, even before all of this the TCG had it’s own inflation cor various cards, boosters and everything else.
But ever since it became a main-stream thing just because, it’s spiralled out of control.
@EliteXeos Logan Paul? What did he do this time?
Most of them sold to scalpers.
You have to feel for all the poor Sudowoodo that have been slain in order to produce them
@AstroTheGamosian
He basically started this latest current trend in Pokemon cards for YouTubers and the like.
Oy vey. Yet another thing he's had to ruin. It was because of his antics that I lost my partnership with YouTube because I didn't have enough views or subscribers, and the COPPA fiasco was essentially the deathblow to my channel, forcing me to delete the videos that I had uploaded. As much as I would like to start up my channel again, part of me wonders if it's even worth it anymore.
And now with Twitch's controversies regarding bans and draconian TOS (even more so than YouTube's), it essentially means I don't really have a streamer-friendly platform to stream on or upload to. It essentially comes down to the classic lesser of two evils. It puts me in a Kobayashi Maru scenario: a no-win scenario.
How many of those were legit purchases?
And probably 90% of those sales went to scalpers, 8% to YouTube and Twitch content creators and 2% literally anyone else.
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