iStockphoto / apilarinos
There is a new Pokémon game which launched worldwide on October 30th, Pokémon TCG Pocket, which is already raking in tens of millions of dollars and has rocketed to #1 on the ‘Free Games’ chart across the globe in the iTunes and Google Play stores. The game itself is pretty simple in nature because it mirrors the Pokémon TCG except in virtual/app form, and players ‘open packs’ on their phones to ‘collect them all’ instead of doing it all in stores. It could also save the NFT market along the way.
The meteoric rise in popularity of NFTs can only be rivaled by the precipitous plummet NFTs saw when many people realized they were being bamboozled by snake oil salesmen, but the NFT industry might have found its savior in the form of Pokémon Pocket because ‘trainers’ are going nuts for this game. Since Pokémon Pocket was launched worldwide, the game’s developer DeNA has already reportedly made $50 million from users buying additional booster packs.
Currently, Pocket is the #1 free game in the iTunes Store in the United States. The Japan Times reported that as of Monday of this week, the game had been downloaded over 30 million times worldwide and “consistently remained on top of the download charts in the Japanese iOS and Android app stores.”
How Pokémon Pocket Works, How It Makes Money, And Why It’s Exploding In Interest
Curious to see for myself what this game was all about, I download Pokémon Pocket which was super easy to find since it was #1 on the ‘Free Games’ list in the iTunes store. The first thing that struck me about this app is… what took them so long to release this? It scratches almost the same itch as opening Pokémon TCG booster packs IRL. You even use your finger to ‘tear open’ each pack, and get a free one every 12 hours.
Pokémon Pocket / Cass Anderson
Each pack comes with 5 cards. You can speed that process up by using items you collect in the game. There are special gems that knock an hour off the 12-hour wait time until you can open up your next free pack.
Trading cards is also a huge part of Pokémon Pocket. ‘Trainers’ can connect with friends on there but there is also a section called ‘Wonder Pick’ where trainers can pick a card from another trainer’s deck. The game shows you 5 possible cards, shuffles them up, flips them over, and you pick.
And of course… There’s a store. In-app purchases in this game are going through the roof. There are already Pokémon streamers chasing the rarest of cards by buying rare packs. And those rare packs are all the rage:
A typical pack in the Pokémon Pocket store costs ¥170 or about $1.09. Trainers can buy/open up to 120 packs each day. And there have already been YouTubers racking up millions of views while opening the rarest of packs.
One video has 2 million views, another has 1 million. I wish I spoke Japanese because watching this with the translated English captions on just isn’t the same:
Currently, there are more than 300 cards available to collect within Pokémon Pocket. ‘Collecting them all’ is an expensive task but so is opening Pokémon Surging Sparks boxes. I scooped a box last week with my kindergartener and it was $130 for the 32 packs.
Opening up 32 packs on Pokémon Pocket would cost me about $32. Sure, it’s an NFT and I could just screenshot the cards other people share online but there’s no fun in that. Since everything is contained within the Pokémon Pocket game it’s not like a stolen NFT plastered up as someone’s avatar on X. You really do have to collect them all.
30 million downloads as of this Monday pales in comparison to Pokémon Go at its peak. In 2016, there were over 232 million active Pokémon Go players worldwide. But this game has only been out for 2 weeks! It has plenty of time to catch up.
For more on this game, you can visit the Pokémon Pocket website for announcements.