The $120 Billion Empire: Why Pokémon Succeeds

The biggest franchise in the history of the world by revenue is Pokémon. It is set to cross at least $120 billion this week with the release of the newest games, Scarlet and Violet. The next closest is one you’d probably never guess: Hello Kitty. Not kidding. But why does Pokémon succeed so easily against franchises that existed long before it? Merchandizing.

As I have mentioned many times before here, I have a marketing degree. Since I also do fiction writing in my spare time, I have come to understand the key to lifelong success of a creative brand: License fees for merchandise. What are those?!? In order for a company like, say, Hasbro to make action figures or any product of an intellectual property, that company must pay a license fee to the Intellectual Property (IP) holder or own the IP kit and caboodle. Hasbro owns Transformers, G.I. Joe, and Power Rangers in toto, among other brands. License fees are basically free money for a successful brand. Every period of license expiration, the IP holder gets to negotiate a new contract and then gets a check for some company to take all the risk in making merch for that IP for a set period of time. It’s truly beautiful.

Nintendo and Game Freak, the developer of the Pokémon games, make bank off the games, but beyond that, make absolute gold off of license fees. Nintendo used to be very protective of its IP in the West when it came to merch, but Pokémon was never one of those franchises. We may have only started getting a glut of Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda merch in the last decade or so, but Pokémon merch has been everywhere since it became a global craze in the fall of 1998. That’s when the Red and Blue games were released for the original Game Boy in the United States and the anime with the greatest theme song of all time came out. Gotta catch ‘em all!

I was an OG Pokémon fan. I played the original games, obsessively watched the anime, collected but never learned how to play the card game, and enjoyed the merch we got. This was in the form of school supplies, lunch boxes, plushies, keychains, and the occasional PVC vinyl figure, among others. Nintendo didn’t seem to fully embrace action figures until the late ‘00s for some reason. Pikachu is one of the most iconic and identifiable pop culture icons ever, possibly surpassing Mickey Mouse for top dog rodent. The Burger King Pokémon kids’ meal toys went bonkers until a dumb parent let a baby suffocate on one of the Pokéballs. The reveal of new Pokémon makes the world squeal in delight. The new starter I love the most is Fuecoco, who will evolve into a Fire/Ghost pepper skeleton crocodile with a flame sombrero and a singing aesthetic. If that doesn’t sell you on Pokémon, I don’t know what will.

Merchandise is how Pokémon stays relevant. Since there are close to a thousand Pokémon now (the true count for the new games hasn’t come out yet,) Nintendo will never ever run out of cute beasts to pimp as plushes, fierce ones to sell action figures of, or doofy bastards for the world to fall in love with. It also doesn’t hurt that Game Freak releases a new mainline Pokémon game every year or every other year (depending on if DLC counts.) This means a near constant stream of new Pokémon to turn into merch. Add to that regional variants, regional evolutions, time-dilated regional variants, and now regional splinters (Pokémon that are like another species we know of but are not even related to it) and you get fresh Pokémon for every type of person. And the newest games will even be open world after the success of Pokémon Legends: Arceus, a spin-off that, unlike most of the spin-offs, was still focused on Pokémon battles. It had an open world design and was very well received when it came out earlier this year.

But the real question remains: Why am I still a Pokémon fan? It’s easy: The games are very fun. I stopped watching the anime a long time ago (it got too chockablock with filler,) but the games have entertained me to various degrees since I first got Blue all those years ago. The designs of the creatures, the music that slaps hard, and the crushing defeats I leave all challengers to the throne. I don’t play multiplayer, so this means NPCs, as online competitive Pokémon is a bramble batch of chip damage. I collect occasional merch, especially the new highly articulated action figures. Haven’t personally bought a plush for myself in a long time, but I am certainly getting a Fuecoco one the moment I can. I do buy them for my nieces and nephew as well as my fiancée. I even got a Mega Blaziken action figure for my nephew. Blaziken is easily my favorite Pokémon. My record these past IX Gens of Pokémon has been tilted towards preferring the Water starters, but a cockfighting chicken that’s on fire goes way too hard. Five Water starters, three Fire starters, and one Grass starter. I don’t have every Pokémon’s name memorized, but I know the best ones. And that’s both a form and a function discussion. I prefer cool looking Pokémon, but they also have to be useful. Glass cannons with a bad Speed stat will either be EV trained to up the Speed stat as much as possible or be dropped like a hot potato. Sorry, Salazzle…

I continue to strive to be the very best, like no one ever was. You can join me Friday.