Exploring Pokemon TCG Pocket's Revenue Trends by Jakub Remiar

definitely keep an eye on this game and of course we'll talk about you know review radar but yeah

let's see because it's quite interesting and yeah the my estimate that in 12 months it will do around

980 million i guess they're still still on the way to do it but yeah let's see if they

it will heavily depend now on the pvp in feature implementation I'm going to go today about is Pokemon TCG Pocket and the latest updates, which were, I think, quite, yeah, as I guess everybody was expecting what will happen with the trading feature and all these things and especially how the numbers will change. So, yeah, without further further ado let's look into this and check what actually happened and let's go really granular one by one because i guess there's a lot of things to talk through here so looking at the revenue of course this is the main point here uh you can clearly see that during the launch of the game at the start of nove, as the first set pretty much hit in, that was the A1 set, revenue spikes went all the way to something like 5 million a day, and the game pretty much then kind of went down a little bit, as it's like a typical format with a gacha game.
If you look at something like, I don't know, Kenshin Impact, it always goes in these spikes when new content is released, new gachas, new banter stuff. And that's normal for a gacha game.
This other spike here on December 18 or 17, that is basically the expansion, the mini expansion during Christmas that was released. And then you see that the game gradually went down and down and down and down it could look like it whatever it's going down but fret not this is a gacha game these goes in spikes so this is this is not really the stuff that happens within these games and so we are here in thursday january 30th where the game hit record revenue and it hit record revenue even on saturday to something like 7 million 600k dollars which i guess we'll see how long this will last but i guess it will be just a few days until kind of goes down a little bit uh regarding the download section um i would say kind of pretty stable like if we just omit the sharp spike during the launch, yeah, I guess it's kind of somewhere consolidated.
Now you see that it's rising again to something like 400k downloads a day. Just to kind of check the filter here.
That is still driven mainly by US, which is very positive because mostly people think it's just japan japan is half of us here if you look at active users it's pretty much i think back at its all time high which was something like 20 million daily active users yeah 19 something i guess they'll get there here because people are logging in back to kind of check the new packs new cards and stuff like that u.s still taking the majority here with around 21 percent japan with 10 percent france with 11 it's very surprising but yeah very good tier one traffic up here so definitely pre-steam player base and if we look at the retention yeah the numbers are I think like the wildest i ever seen on cesser tower i think this like something's broken here because this doesn't make any sense so day one 71 day seven 53 day 30 43 day 60 42 day 90 42 basically from day 30 the line just flat. 42%.
I don't think so. This is the case.
I guess somewhere is probably wrong here, but again, probably the retention is very high, but not this high. I guess we need to take this with a grain of salt or like as we say, sadness multiplier, but I don't know.
Going back to the revenue, there was this one interesting trend here that i want to showcase where if we go by countries filter the like you can see that in the beginning of the game it was driving mainly by japan japan is the biggest revenue share of biggest country on the revenue share by and still like if we take lifetime revenue of the game is

like 40 percent with us just 25 but if we see this latest expansion here uh which we have here yeah this is just the new year from january 1st we see how us is sharply spiking up to something like 31 percent of japan falling a little bit down because yeah it seems that it is yeah now I guess it got back a little bit now Japan overtook on Saturday US but definitely in the beginning US was the major country behind the revenue growth there but yeah let's see how this goes and I don't think so like japan will be over too long term it's just that it's very positive for the game that it's not only in japan or like an asian thing it's also very strong in the u.s because of course pokemon brand is the biggest ip in the world and it's also very strong in the u.s um yeah moving on so let's get into the aim to see what's actually happened so looking at these uh new packs that we have here so we had the new expansion called space time smackdown which again we have two different packs that have different cards in them some of them are same some of them are the chase cards especially dialga and palkia and we have uh you see here, different cards that are just very specific for this deck, such as, I don't know. I don't really know these new Pokemons, to be honest.
I stopped at like 250. So this is now going definitely over 250, but let's see.
But basically, based on the current meta, if you look here uh we can check yeah these are the x cards in the deck which are just specific to this deck so these five x cards you can get only from this deck and then palkeo can get the other five so yeah i guess dark cry x is the most i guess currently sort of card because there's a new passive damage meta i'll get to it a little bit and then in palkia uh yeah same thing just a different flavor yeah here we are we will x again we will x is the most kind of sort of card palkia is pretty much like the new art Articonomistic thing, but yeah, let's see. Let's see how the meta shifts later about it now.
But yeah, we have new cards. There are not that many as they were before, because if we go here and check, the initial batch of cards was 226.
Then the mini expansion during Christmas time was 68 cards, the new Mythical Island one, and now we got 155 cards, so pretty much 70 cards less than the usual kind of big expansion. I guess they just wanted to keep the first set as big as possible.
Similarly how CCGs do it. And then slowly, like, these things rotate out.
But yeah, that's there um new card rarity hasn't been added yet i think they it was leaked that they will eventually add new card rarity but no it's not like still the biggest card right is the crown crown cards which are like one in 10 000 cards i think very hard to get like completely gold the thing is that it's just still a visual thing the functionality and the cards that you need to build the biggest decks are just four diamond cards that's it it's like you don't really need uh the cosmetic nature of these cards so if we scroll here um yeah these are the one star cards two star cards these immersive one three star cards and then i don't even have the crown card here but yeah this is basically all cosmetic there's no functional effect on these cards that you would feel during gameplay okay so what's happening with trading and why are we even talking about this because this seems like business as usual until now so everybody was expecting trading and how it would affect the game because and i'll stop here for a second gacha games thrive on randomness meaning that you can choose what you get the whole gacha is a progression system so it slowly gives you a new, pretty much, new cards, new cards that they will deal with you and you need to kind of figure out your strategy, what you dealt with. So that's also the beauty of it and you need to kind of figure out from the things that are randomly given to you, how you play it, how you go around your strategy.
Going directly against the gacha, meaning skipping its randomness, is always bad for this model. It's immense value here because these cards and the drop percentages that these are calculated for always take into account that you're getting them randomly.
If you skip all this randomness, meaning meaning like i don't know like like the crown

card as i said you get one in 10 000 rolls so imagine how much dollars i would need to

dish out in order to get 10 000 rolls which statistically would guarantee that you get gold

card and now i can buy it for i don't know five dollars or trade it or something like

giant giant discounts so it's not like yeah gacha games just don't are not compatible with trading

Thank you. or, I don't know, $5, or trade it, or something, giant, giant discounts.

So it's not like, yeah,

gacha games just are not compatible with trading.

So I was expecting that this,

as we talked on a previous podcast that we covered this game,

that this will be some kind of watered-down version, or like they can't really,

it was not physically possible for a game to trade all the cards.

It's just like not physically possible. So let's get to the restriction and see what's actually happening here.
So to start off, like it will just be worse and worse from this point on. You can't trade cards just like that.
Like here's your card, here's my card. You need two things just to initiate the trade.
First thing these trade tokens and uh yeah this is the stuff where it gets really funny because how do you get these trade tokens you burn cards you literally burn your cards that you have in order to trade them for trade tokens so then when you are trading a card for something that you actually want it needs to be accompanied based on its rarity with these trade tokens so um yeah in order to trade one diamond card which are like the common ones you don't need any same for two diamond cards but the three diamond cards which are the rares and four diamond cards the epics or let's say the x pretty much the x pokemon the the meta defining cards that really it's all about you need 500 tokens and by burning the one x card you literally get 125 so we get to a point where uh yeah it's's literally this, and Reddit is now full of memes, where people are very, very angry about this new system, especially from a player's perspective, because it feels very greedy, feels very unintuitive, prohibitive, and as we talked before, gachas are not really compatible with these systems, and of course they created as prohibitive as possible, with as much friction as possible. What you see here on the screen, this is pretty much it.
You need to burn five, three diamond cards in order to get one diamond card. That's it.
As I said, memes are everywhere uh this is actually it so if i want to um if i want to get an x card from my friend i actually need to burn an equivalent of four of these x cards you know to get just the trade tokens to initiate the trade on top of it because why not uh there's even more friction and more prohibitive stuff there's this trading energy which uh what it does it basically you can only trade so much and these like each car needs to be accompanied by wine trading energy and it takes 24 hours to kind of regenerate one so you can do five trades and then like one trade a day basically

if you look into the guide yeah there's a guide and this is where it gets really really like the

most most prohibitive thing ever so you can only trade with your friends another another thing that

limits you you can just there's no auction house there's nothing you can just select the friend in

your trade list and then you choose just one card from your collection and you send it to that friend

Thank you. house there's nothing you can just select the friend in your trade list and then you choose just one card from your collection and you send it to that friend but yeah you're asking like wait a second like how that friend knows that if like which card i want to trade this for or like which which one i need you don't that's the point so it's as prohibitive that you literally need to communicate outside of the game because there's no chat, no nothing.
So somehow you need to get to that friend and tell him that you want this card. So basically he needs to be sitting right next to you.
Or you go on Discord servers where people are, of course, matching each other requests and a lot of friction basically going outside of the then, yeah, you initiate the trade and that's it basically. And there's notifications if it happens, but of course the game assumes that he's basically sitting right next to you.
So this is not important anymore. Cards, as we said, can be traded only for the same rarity.
So for instance, I now am trading here like this train that i sent to john thanks john shout out to you and uh yeah i pretty much just said okay do you want my serperia three diamond card and can you send me and there's nothing to it honestly like you just can't tell anything uh and there's no possibility possibility even to communicate like which card you want. So they made it as prohibitive as possible.
As said, there's a lot of these memes. And the power player community, they are very, very angry.
Everybody's angry. But as we see on the revenue, it doesn't matter.
Nobody cares because the game hitting all-time record so that's that's how it is um i'm thinking that they will basically just leave it as it is as said the the most prohibitive thing and why this was not uh available during launch is that you can trade stuff from the current expansion so that's why we didn't get it on the launch because there were no previous expansion to trade for. So we need to wait for one expansion to rotate out so it gets into the past and the new comes in, which is the shiny one that's pretty much dragging this 8 million a day column spike in Censor Tower.
And now you can pretty much as some kind of a pt timer or like forgiving part to kind of enable other players to come in and to be able to create like this opening of new players that they can still join in you can catch up now much faster on the previous expansion because you can actually trade with that so if you you find someone, you can trade the cards that you get as duplicates and it will speed up a little bit the collection. And you still need those cards, don't get me wrong.
Top decks still require stuff from the previous expansion. But of course, everybody is now switching to the new expansion.
So that's there. But yeah, I think there was no...
From a player's perspective, there was no good choice here. From a games perspective, also there was no other choice than this to make it as prohibitive as possible.
By the way, also promo cards cannot be traded. So only, and all those like giant chase, cosmetic cards, like two-star, three-star, like they also cannot be traded.
traded and yet at least that's what they said and I think they're just like slowly trying to move away from this thing probably they just implemented it because this is the name of the game because it's a trading card game and there was no trading in it but this is not really trading this is is as prohibitive as it can get. But yeah, they still implemented it.
And there we go. So even though there was the big community uproar, the revenue is hitting record high.
So I think the game will still be great. The problem that I have with the game now, as the feature set is, this trading thing is like a a nothing burger so we don't really need to talk about this anymore the problem is that if we go to battling part there's still no proper ladder so we can go random match or we can go private match but there's still no ladder no ranking no pvp stats no rewards for this nothing the only thing that happens is that events kind of frequently rotate out, come and go.
It's either win 45 cumulative wins and get an emblem or win five wins in a row, which is, again, even more harder. And you can get these kind of emblems that you can get for battling from those events.
That's great, but that's it basically. And it gets boring and repetitive pretty fast.
So they really need to come up with proper PVP ladder ranking and proper new events that are being put into the rotation. Because currently the game is uh if you look at what's kind of waiting there in the pipeline so here we are so there will be some new rare events by the way anybody that wants to hop in wait for this one this is the top card in like the meta to get there uh there will be some special booster packs during the 27th February, which is Pokemon Day, where you will get a guarantee four Diamond cards.
So like three Four Diamond X cards everybody will get. Of course, from the older packs, not the new packs new packs like what did you expect so that's there there's also the McDonald's promotion running with the game in America where you can get either these 15 promo cards for the actual physical cards and 24 pack hourglasses and 12 wonderglasses if you input the code so that's running until

24th of February

and yeah where

do we have this

I think I had it somewhere here

yeah here we go

so there's a drop event

starting on 3rd of February

there's emblem event

starting on 4th of February

wonderpick event 7th of February

darkness time mass outbreak event

21st of February

There's a lot of people who are February, there's emblem event starting on 4th of February, wonder peak event 7th of February, darkness time mass outbreak event 21st of February. This was the one that I was showing this one.
Yeah, so they keep rotating these events. Those are pretty much templatized that they're just like nothing new yet as for functionality, which is a little bit worrying.
I guess by this time it should have something new or something other. It would be even

great if, let's say, the

single player content got fleshed out a little

bit, of course. They added new

solo battles during the expansion

here. So, yeah,

there's, like, new stuff and some

more free-to-play rewards, but this, again,

gets very, very,

like, yeah, you pretty much blaze through it nothing really to it so yeah this is my biggest grab with the game currently that it needs to it needs to increase its feature set like we need new stuff new leather pvp ranking and new events because the cards and the sets are definitely working as you see there and they already said there will be a new expansion in three months and there will be a new mini expansion in between and you need to keep up with the meta of course you'll need to uh yeah pay a lot because if you look at the best best decks currently you see that yeah the top decks like this this new one is basically all the cards from the new meta like like literally I think just the Pokeballs the Retreat and Professor Ogre, the old ones all these other cards are new, so you need to get those, this is an upgrade of the Pikachu deck, which is these two cards, these two again, something like 8, but 2x 2x cards again Palkia has its own, Dialga has its own, XTech Darkrai even if it's the same, like you see so it's by this kind of power creep that they're trying to scale the content of the game so new cards will be always stronger than the previous cards or counter the current meta I guess eventually they'll get stronger and stronger meaning they'll actually raise the HP damage of these cards because there's no way around it and then the old cards will be rotated out or reprinted later i don't know maybe that's also a possibility but as you see here yeah the top decks are basically from the new expansion so this is working good for now but let's see how how long it lasts we'll definitely keep an eye on this game. And of course, we'll talk about, you know,

review radar, but yeah, let's see,

because it's quite interesting.

And yeah, my estimate that in 12 months,

it will do around 980 million.

I guess they're still on the way to do it.

But yeah, let's see if they,

it will heavily depend now on the PVP feature implementation and expansion of their events pipeline. But yeah, let's see if they it will heavily depend now on the PVP feature

implementation and expansion

of their events pipeline, but yeah, let's see

Yeah, thanks for listening

I guess we'll

do more of these solo

podcasts from now on because

they're easy to do

and we like to talk

about some different topics, feel free to

suggest that if you want to join our Slack

or subscribe

as usual, see you around

Thank you. And yeah, we like to talk about some different topics.
Feel free to suggest that if you want to join our Slack or subscribe as usual.

See you around. Have a nice day.
Bye-bye. Thank you.