Exploring Pokemon TCG Pocket's Revenue Trends by Jakub Remiar

Speaker 1 Definitely keep an eye on this game, and of course, we'll talk about it on review radar. But yeah, let's see, because it's quite interesting.
And

Speaker 1 yeah,

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 heavily depend now on the PvP

Speaker 1 feature implementation. And

Speaker 1 it's 4 a.m.

Speaker 2 and we're rolling the dice. Mate drops, knowledge made of gold and ice.
Felix with ads making those coins rise. Jackup designs worlds chasing the sky.

Speaker 2 We're the two and a half gamers, the midnight crew. Talking UA adverts and game design too.
Matei, Felix, Shaku, bringing the insight. We're rocking those vibes till the early daylight.

Speaker 2 But KUA master eyes on the prize. Tracking data through the cyberspace skies.
Felix stacks colors like a wizard in disguise. Jackups craft arounds lift us to the highs.

Speaker 2 Two and a half gamers talking smack. Slow hockey stick, got your back.
Ads are beautiful, they like the way. Click it fast, don't delay.
Uh-huh.

Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 Hello, hello.

Speaker 1 So, we're back with the monologue sections about some, I guess, different topics that were in the whole podcast in the video.

Speaker 1 So, let's get to this. What I want to talk today about is Pokemon TCG Pocket and the latest updates which were, I think, quite

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So yeah, without further ado, let's look into this and check what actually happened and let's go really granularly one by one because I guess there's a lot of things to talk through here.

Speaker 1 So looking at the revenue, of course, this is the main point here.

Speaker 1 You can clearly see that during the launch of the game at the start of November, as the first set pretty much hit in, that was the A1 set, the 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 the gacha game.

Speaker 1 Like 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 banner stuff. And that's that's normal for a gacha game.

Speaker 1 This other spike here on December 18 or 17, that is basically the

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so we are here in thursday january 30th where the game hit the record revenue and it hit record revenue even on saturday to something like seven million six hundred k dollars

Speaker 1 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 yep i guess it's kind of somewhere console Now we see that it's rising again to something like 400k downloads a day.

Speaker 1 Just to kind of check the filter here.

Speaker 1 That is still driven mainly by US, which is very positive because mostly people think that it's just Japan. Japan is half of US here.
If you look at

Speaker 1 active users, it's pretty much, I think, back at its all-time high, which was something like 20 million daily active users.

Speaker 1 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 us still taking the majority here with around 21 japan with 10

Speaker 1 france with 11 it's very surprising but yeah very good tier one traffic up here so definitely pre-steam player base

Speaker 1 and if we look at the

Speaker 1 retention yeah the numbers are i think like the wildest i ever seen on says a tower i think this like something's broken here because this doesn't make any sense. So day one, 71%.

Speaker 1 Day seven, fifty-three percent, day thirty, forty-three percent, day sixty, forty-two percent, day ninety, forty-two. Basically, from day 30, the line just is flat.

Speaker 1 42%. I don't think so.
This is the case. I guess somewheres.
Somewhere's probably wrong here. But again, probably the retention is very high, but not this high.

Speaker 1 I guess we need to take this with a grain of salt or, I guess we say, sadness multiplier, but I don't know uh going back to the revenue there was this one interesting trend here uh that i want to showcase where if we go by countries filter the

Speaker 1 like you can see that in the beginning of the game it was driving mainly by japan like japan is the the biggest revenue share of

Speaker 1 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 percent but if we see this latest expansion here,

Speaker 1 which we have here, yeah, this is just the new year from January 1st. We see how US

Speaker 1 is sharply spiking up to something like 31% and Japan falling a little bit down. Because,

Speaker 1 yeah, it seems that it is, yeah, now I guess it got back a little bit. Now, Japan overtook on Saturday, US.

Speaker 1 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 overtook long term.

Speaker 1 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 US because, of course, Pokemon brand is the biggest IP in the world.

Speaker 1 And it's also very strong in the US.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Moving on.
So let's get into the aim to see what's actually happened. So looking at these new packs that we have here.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Some of them are the chase cards, especially Gyalga and Palkia.

Speaker 1 And we have,

Speaker 1 as you see here,

Speaker 1 different cards that are just very specific for this deck, such as,

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 I don't really know these new Pokemons, to be honest. Like, I stop 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

Speaker 1 we can check

Speaker 1 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 Palkia you can get the other five so

Speaker 1 yeah I guess Darkrai X is the most I guess currently sort of card because there's a new passive damage meta I'll get to it in a little bit And then in Palkia,

Speaker 1 yeah, same thing,

Speaker 1 just a different flavor. Yeah, here we are.
Weevil X again. Weevil X is the most kind of sort of card.
Palkia is pretty much like the new Articunomisti thing, but yeah, let's see.

Speaker 1 Let's see how the meta shifts later. But

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Then the mini expansion during Christmas time was 68 cards, the new mythical island one, and now we got

Speaker 1 155 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,

Speaker 1 and then slowly like these things rotate out. But yeah, that's there.

Speaker 1 New card rarity hasn't been added yet.

Speaker 1 I think they it was leaked that they will eventually add new card rarity, but no, it's not like still the biggest card rarity is the crown crown cards, which are the like one in ten thousand cards.

Speaker 1 I think very hard to get, like completely gold.

Speaker 1 The thing is that it's just still a visual thing.

Speaker 1 The functionality and the 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 What's happening with trading and why are we even talking about this? Because this seems like business as usual until now

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The whole gacha is a progression system, so it slowly gives you a new, pretty much

Speaker 1 new cards,

Speaker 1 new cards that they will deal with you, and you need to kind of figure out your strategy, what you dealt with.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 you go around your strategy.

Speaker 1 Going directly against the gacha, meaning skipping its randomness, is always bad for this model.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 If you skip all of this randomness, meaning like

Speaker 1 I don't know, like the crown card, as I said, you get one in 10,000 rolls.

Speaker 1 So imagine how much dollars I would need to dish out in order to get 10,000 rolls, which statistically would guarantee that get gold card.

Speaker 1 And now I can buy it for, I don't know, $5 or trade it or something.

Speaker 1 Giant, giant discounts. So it's not like, yeah, catch a games just are not compatible with trading.
So I was expecting that this...

Speaker 1 as we talked on a previous podcast that we covered this game that uh this will be some kind of watered down version or like they can't really it was not physically possible for 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 um 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 is these trade tokens

Speaker 1 and 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

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 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 meta defining cards that really it's all about you need 500 tokens

Speaker 1 and by burning the one X card you literally get 125

Speaker 1 so we get to a point where

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 it's literally this and Reddit is like now full of memes where people are very

Speaker 1 very

Speaker 1 angry about this new system, especially from players' perspective, because it's very

Speaker 1 feels very greedy, feels very unintuitive, prohibitive. And as we talked before, gachas are not really compatible with these systems.

Speaker 1 Of course, they created as prohibitive as possible, with as much friction as possible. So, yeah, what you see here on the screen, this is pretty much it.

Speaker 1 Like, you need to burn five, three diamond cards in order to get one diamond card. that that's it and it's as i said that like as i said memes are everywhere uh this is actually it so if i want to

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 you can only trade so much and these like each card needs to be accompanied by one 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 uh 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 uh so you can only trade with your friends another not the thing that limits you you can just there's no auction house, there's nothing.

Speaker 1 You can just select the friend in your trade list.

Speaker 1 And then you choose just one card from your collection and you send it to that friend.

Speaker 1 But yeah, you're asking like, wait a second, how that friend knows that if, like, which card I want to trade this for, or like,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Or you go on Discord servers where people are of course matching each other requests and you know a lot of friction basically going outside of the game. So and then

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Cards as we said can be traded only for the same rarity for 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 superior three diamond card and can you send me it 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 uh as said there's a lot of these memes and like

Speaker 1 the real like 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 is 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

Speaker 1 from the current expansion. So that's why we didn't get it on the launch because there were no previous expansions to trade for.
So they need to wait for one expansion to rotate out.

Speaker 1 So it gets into the past and a new comes in, which is the shiny one that's pretty much dragging this 8 million a day

Speaker 1 column spike in sensor tower.

Speaker 1 And now you can

Speaker 1 pretty much as some kind of a pity 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.

Speaker 1 You can catch up now much faster on the previous expansion because you can actually trade with that. So if you find somebody, you can trade the cards that you get as duplicates.

Speaker 1 And yeah, it will speed up a little bit the

Speaker 1 collection. And you still need those cards, don't get me wrong.
Like top decks still require stuff from the previous expansion. But of course, everybody is now switching to the new expansion.

Speaker 1 so that's there but uh yeah i think there was no like from players perspective there was no good choice here from games from a games perspective also there was no like other choice than this to make it as prohibitive prohibitive as possible uh by the way also promo cards cannot be traded so only and and and all those like giant chased cosmetic cards like two star three star gold like they also cannot be traded and yet at least that was they said and i think they're just like slowly trying to

Speaker 1 move away from this thing. Probably they just implemented it because it is the name of the game, because it's a

Speaker 1 trading card game and there was no trading in it. But this is not really trading.
This is like as prohibitive as this can get.

Speaker 1 But yeah, they still implemented it. And

Speaker 1 there we go. So even though there was the big community uproar, the revenue is hitting record highs.
So I think the game will still be great.

Speaker 1 The problem that I have with the game now, as the feature said, is it's like this trading thing is like a nothing burner, so we don't really need to talk about this anymore.

Speaker 1 The problem is that if we go to battling part, there's still no proper ladder.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 kind of frequently rotate out,

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 you can get these kind of

Speaker 1 emblems, yeah, that you can get like for battling from those events. That's great, but that's it basically.
And it gets boring and repetitive pretty fast.

Speaker 1 So they really need to come up with proper PvP leather ranking and proper like new events that are being put into the rotation because currently the game is uh

Speaker 1 if you look at what's kind of waiting there in the pipeline

Speaker 1 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 the meta to to get there

Speaker 1 uh there will be some special booster packs during the 27th february during 27th February, which is Pokemon Day, where you will get a guarantee four diamond cards. So, like

Speaker 1 three four diamond X cards, you everybody will get,

Speaker 1 of course, from the older packs, not the new packs. Like, what did you expect?

Speaker 1 So, that's there.

Speaker 1 There's also the McDonald's promotion running with the game in America, where you can get either these like 15 promo cards for the actual physical cards, and 24 pack hourglasses and 12 wonder glasses if you input the code so that's running until 24th of February and

Speaker 1 yeah where do we have this

Speaker 1 I think I had it somewhere here yeah here we go so there's a drop event starting on 3rd of February there's in blam 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.

Speaker 1 This one, yeah, so they keep rotating these events. Those are pretty much templatized.
They're just like nothing new yet as for functionality, which is a little bit worrying.

Speaker 1 I guess by this time it should have something new or something other.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 blast through it nothing really to it

Speaker 1 so yeah this is my biggest grab with the game currently that it needs to

Speaker 1 it needs to increase its feature set like we need new stuff new leather pvp ranking and new events because this 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 new mini expansion in between and you in order to keep up with the meta, of course, you'll need to

Speaker 1 pay a lot. Because if you look at the best decks currently, you see that, yeah, the top decks, like this, this new one, is basically all the cards from the new meta.

Speaker 1 Like, literally, I think just the Pokeballs, the retreat, and Professor Ogar, the old ones, all these other cards are new, so you need to get those.

Speaker 1 This is an upgrade of the Pikachu deck, which is these two cards, these two, again, again, something like eight, but 2x,

Speaker 1 two x cards again palkia has its own the alga has its own x tech darkai even if if 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 they'll counter the current meta i guess eventually they'll get stronger and stronger meaning they actually raise the hp damage of these cards because they don't

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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 in review radar but yeah let's see because it's uh quite interesting and uh

Speaker 1 yeah the

Speaker 1 My estimate that in twelve months it will do around nine hundred eighty million.

Speaker 1 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 and expansion of their events pipeline but yeah let's see yeah thanks for listening um

Speaker 1 i guess we'll do more of these kind of solo podcasts uh from now on because they're easy to do uh 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.

Speaker 1 Bye-bye.