The Pokémon Company has announced that it will be purchasing the North American card-printing company 'Millennium Print Group' for an undisclosed sum.
The printing company has already been producing and packing cards for the Pokémon Trading Card Game since 2015 after partnering up with The Pokémon Company. The move will not have a major affect on Millennium's day-to-day productions, with the company still operating as a separate entity; The Pokémon Company will instead be providing "investment and industry expertise" while assisting Millennium in expanding its capabilities and infrastructure.
Kenji Okubo, President of The Pokémon Company, had this to say:
"The talented team at Millennium Print Group has been an important partner to The Pokemon Company International for many years, helping us bring the Pokemon Trading Card Game to our fans with the quality they expect. By joining forces in a more meaningful way, our goal is to enhance the ways our organizations work together and continue to bring the highest quality Pokemon TCG products to market. Simultaneously, we aim to develop Millennium into an even better, bigger, state-of-the-art version of their already exceptional organization, benefiting not just Pokemon, but all of their customers."
Hopefully this move will at least ensure that Pokémon cards will be more readily available going forwards. Just recently, a man was sentenced to 3 years in prison for spending COVID-19 relief money on a rare Pokémon card.
What do you make of this move by The Pokémon Company? Let us know with a comment.
[source thegamer.com]
Comments 18
Was always on the cards.
@Franklin You win the comments section today
Can they also buy the rights for Pokemon movie 4,5,6,7 from Miramax so that they can finally be released in HD without people having to pay $100+ for the limited time Blu-ray release, since Miramax continually refuse to release them in HD after that for some reason.
Considering the fact that they were the main Pokemon card manufacturer in the west anyway, how much will this actually affect Pokemon card stock? It will naturally go up thanks to more hands-on funding but unless they create more printing locations, I don't see the current issues going away anytime soon.
he says as he adds a Pikachu V Box to cart.
The problem is due to a cardboard shortage... so it'll not change anything in that regard
@Dragonite89 I think Lionsgate is the current owners of those actually, they just got them recently. So there's a bit of hope they might do better.
EDIT: Nm, it was when Lionsgate acquired them that the HD versions stopped being printed welp.
@Fizza It's not nessecarily meant to fix those specific problems. There are advantages to having control over a bigger part of the supply chain, and if nothing else, probably a monetary value.
Not surprised, due to that huge boost in card sales from the fad of Pokémon Card openings.
Remeber when Andrew Carnagie had a monopoly on all stages of the steel production process? I'm sure this random thought that I just had has nothing to do with this.
From a printer standpoint their facility looks sick. Absolutely huge with 7 presses. Two of them being 8 color inline UV/Aqueous coating. Wowie plenty of dream machines there. It would be so neat to work on printing that kind of stuff, never thought to look up where that was printed before. Interesting article, thanks for the info!
This isn't going to stop people from spending too much on Pokemon cards, sorry. But if it helps people that just want to collect packs they can buy at retail then I'm all for it.
Would be cool if they up the quality to the same level as the Japanese cards!
@jorel262 How are people spending "too much" on Pokémon cards? If they can afford it, its not too much for them 🤷♂️
@ImmortanJho You are right that has nothing to do with this, cards are made of paperboard, not steel. Other companies can still print other cards, The Pokémon Company International already own the rights to the Pokémon TCG anyway, so it won't be more monoply than it already is.
@Tobiaku Agree with you that "too much" is a relative term. I was focused on what is stated in the article at the end.
"Hopefully this move will at least ensure that Pokémon cards will be more readily available going forwards. Just recently, a man was sentenced to 3 years in prison for spending COVID-19 relief money on a rare Pokémon card."
Wasn't it Creatures Inc?
@Franklin Well done
Could've sworn I heard that Nintendo was keeping up their tradition of making cards by producing the Pokemon trading cards. Maybe they just print them for Japan only or I heard wrong...
Imo the card foil quality seemed lower once reverse foils became a thing. I still think the Pokemon cards that came out before reverse foils started coming out, had much more unique foil patterns and overall better card quality.
@Tobiaku Very clever. A company should not own all parts of a production process, regardless of a situation. It's just asking for greed.
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