Working with Pokémon is good, steady business, and it lasts as long as The Pokémon Company (TPC) is content to leave the job to someone else. The partners need Pokémon far more than it needs them. TPC accounts for 21.0% of DeNA’s sales; DeNA accounts for 5.8% of the TPC parent’s. The biggest money sits with the shops and distributors between TPC and the shopper, who keep ¥205–358bn a year on our estimate, and that is the ground TPC has been moving onto, a step at a time, since 2003.
Partners need Pokémon far more than it needs them
Two partners state in their own accounts what they earn from TPC. DeNA, which builds TCG Pocket, booked ¥31.1bn from it in the year to March 2026, about a fifth of everything DeNA sold and down from ¥35.5bn the year before (Pocket’s fall is on Mobile). SLD, a listed restaurant company that runs Pokémon Café shops for a fee, took 15.9% of its sales from TPC, up from 10.8% two years earlier. Fig. 1 turns each figure round. Against the parent company’s revenue of ¥531.4bn, DeNA is 5.8% and SLD is 0.11%.
Pokémon is a fifth of DeNA’s sales; DeNA is under 6% of the Pokémon parent company’s
Sales to The Pokémon Company as a share of each partner’s own sales, beside the same sum as a share of the Pokémon parent company’s revenue. Latest financial year. Only these two partners publish the figure.
- Pokémon’s share of the partner’s sales
- The partner’s share of The Pokémon Company’s revenue
Show the numbers
| Partner | Pokémon’s share of the partner’s sales, % of sales | The partner’s share of The Pokémon Company’s revenue, % of sales | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| DeNA (builds TCG Pocket) | |||
| SLD (runs Pokémon Café shops) |
Pokémon’s share of the partner’s sales. From each partner’s annual securities report: sales to The Pokémon Company as a share of its total sales. DeNA’s year runs to March 2026, SLD’s to February 2026.
The partner’s share of The Pokémon Company’s revenue. The same sums divided by the revenue of The Pokémon Company’s Japanese parent, ¥531.4bn in the year to February 2026. Against the whole group DeNA is about 3%.
Retailers show the same lean from the other side. GameStop named “Pokemon” among its three largest suppliers in its latest annual report, and its collectibles line, all brands together, grew 48% in a year when the rest of its sales fell 17%.
The largest pool sized here sits with companies that report nothing about it
DeNA’s figure is the biggest that any partner publishes, and it is small beside the sums that go unreported. Fig. 2 ranks them. Card shops and distributors keep ¥205–358bn of what shoppers pay at list price, before their own costs. For comparison, TPC’s group books ¥223–370bn from cards, so the channel keeps 0.67–1.38× what the publisher does from the same cards. Apple and Google take about ¥85bn and Scopely about ¥56bn, on our estimates. How list price divides along each route is on Trading cards.
Card shops and distributors keep an estimated ¥205–358bn a year, several times any partner’s reported figure
Pokémon money reaching each partner, latest year, ¥ billion. Dark bars come from company accounts; pale bars and the range are our estimates. The rows are on different bases and do not add up. Makers and sellers of licensed goods are not shown.
- From company accounts
- Our estimate
- Our estimate, range
Show the numbers
| Partner | From company accounts, ¥bn | Our estimate, ¥bn | Our estimate, range, ¥bn | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Card shops and distributors | – | – | (205.4–357.9) | |
| Apple and Google app stores | – | – | ||
| Scopely (Pokémon GO) | – | – | ||
| DeNA: revenue from Pokémon | – | – | ||
| TV Tokyo: Pokémon income, at most | – | – |
From company accounts. DeNA’s sales to The Pokémon Company, year to March 2026. TV Tokyo’s figure is an upper bound from the title’s rank in its animation segment.
Our estimate. App stores at 30% of spending in Pokémon’s mobile games; Scopely at about half of Pokémon GO’s. Neither is published.
Our estimate, range. What shops and distributors keep of card sales at list price, before their own costs, across the range of the publisher’s share of list.
The spread stays fixed through bust and boom
A card distributor’s cut on each sale did not widen in the boom. Asmodee distributes the cards in Europe, where 35–50% of list price reaches TPC’s Western arm, TPCi, on our estimate. Its British company files full accounts, charted in Fig. 3. Sales fell 9% in the year to March 2025 and then rose 60% to £224m. Gross margin stayed within 24.5–26.9% in every period on file, and the extra sales of the boom year earned 27.2%, almost the same as the old sales. Operating profit rose 103% on the added volume, and the cut on each box did not move. These accounts cover every product Asmodee UK sells and never name Pokémon.
Asmodee UK’s sales swung between £140m and £224m while its gross margin stayed near 26%
Asmodee UK’s sales by accounting period, all products, £ million, with gross margin printed in each bar. The paler bar covers fifteen months.
- Sales, twelve months
- Sales, fifteen months
Show the numbers
| Period to | Sales, twelve months, £m sales | Sales, fifteen months, £m sales | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 2021 | – | ||
| Mar 2023 | – | ||
| Mar 2024 | – | ||
| Mar 2025 | – | ||
| Mar 2026 | – |
Sales, twelve months. Asmodee UK Limited (filed as Esdevium Games until July 2026), all products, not only Pokémon. Figures inside the bars are gross margin, gross profit as a share of sales: 24.5% to 26.9% in every period.
Sales, fifteen months. January 2022 to March 2023: not comparable with the twelve-month bars, though its margin is.
When a distributor failed, Pokémon stood ahead of the queue
The one public record of TPCi’s terms with a distributor comes from a bankruptcy. Diamond Comic Distributors and its games arm, Alliance, filed for Chapter 11 in January 2025. The court papers list TPCi’s contract as “Pokémon TCG Terms Of Sale - CIP”, a delivered price with carriage and insurance included, and all 37 invoices fell due 30 days after issue. Deliveries came in one burst, with 95% of December’s invoicing shipped in the last six days of 2024.
Short credit kept the exposure small. The debtor’s schedule showed $533,802 owed to TPCi. Wizards of the Coast, the maker of Magic, supplied about a quarter of Alliance’s $161m of yearly sales. TPCi claimed priority for $505,725 of goods delivered in the twenty days before the filing, acknowledged a part-payment as a critical vendor, and agreed a settlement of $324,602 to be paid by Universal Distribution, the buyer it accepted for the contract. A rival bidder could not take the contract over without a further hearing. Ordinary unsecured creditors were reported to have received nothing. The papers do not say how the gap between the two figures was settled, and TPCi kept its invoices out of the record as confidential, so its prices stayed private.
Creators are unpaid, and prizes are the only cash the community receives
The largest group of partners is paid nothing. TPC’s Japanese terms for fan works take a licence that is free, perpetual and irrevocable, and say the company owes creators no payment. No programme run by TPC pays creators cash. The two that pay in kind belong to the companies that book each game’s sales: DeNA gave in-game gems for Pokémon Masters EX, and Niantic, now Scopely, gives item codes for Pokémon GO. At the 2024 World Championships co-streamers carried about 16% of the hours watched, for no fee; TPCi lets them keep platform and sponsor income. For ordinary gameplay video the only general written permission is Nintendo’s guideline, which never names Pokémon. TPC’s own video rules cover one game, UNITE, which closes on 23 March 2027.
The only cash the group pays its community is prize money, drawn in Fig. 4. Stated prizes for a season come to $7–10m, including a $2m pool at Worlds, which is 0.18–0.29% of the parent’s revenue.
Prize money, the only cash Pokémon pays its community, is under a third of one per cent of its revenue
The Pokémon Company’s parent revenue, year to February 2026, against a season’s stated cash prizes and the Worlds pool within them, ¥ billion. Prizes are our estimate from stated minimums.
- Revenue of The Pokémon Company (Japanese parent), year to February 2026
- Stated cash prizes, range
Show the numbers
| Line | Revenue of The Pokémon Company (Japanese parent), year to February 2026, ¥bn | Stated cash prizes, range, ¥bn | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parent company revenue | – | ||
| Prize money, whole season | – | (0.98–1.55) | |
| Of which the Worlds pool | – | (0.28–0.31) |
Revenue of The Pokémon Company (Japanese parent), year to February 2026. From the parent company’s published accounts.
Stated cash prizes, range. Season: the $2m Worlds pool, four International Championships and 30 to 60 Regionals at their stated minimums, $7–10m, converted at ¥140–155 to the dollar. That is 0.18–0.29% of the parent’s revenue; the Worlds pool alone is about 0.06%. The 2026 season falls partly in the following financial year.
TPC has been taking seats back since 2003
When TPC decides a layer is worth owning, the partner leaves. Its American arm began publishing the English card game in 2003, after Wizards of the Coast’s licence ran out, and took over US sales in 2006. Media Factory distributed the Japanese cards until about 2012, on a secondary account, and TPC then took that over. TCG Pocket launched in 2024 with TPC as the seller and DeNA as a paid developer. In February 2026 TPCi signed to buy Excell, its largest US distributor, a deal with no closing on record (see TPCi). Fig. 5 sets the dates in order. The prize has grown with each step. TPC’s card revenue outside Japan is now 1.9–2.5× what Hasbro, the licensee of the first boom, sold in its best year.
Pokémon has taken over the selling of its own cards one step at a time since 2003
Dates on which selling Pokémon cards moved in-house. The 2012 date rests on a secondary account; the Excell deal is signed and has not closed.
What it adds up to
Asmodee UK, the distributor whose margin has held within 24.5–26.9% through boom and bust, files its next accounts by the end of December 2027.