The Pokemon franchise is undoubtedly considered to be one of the highest earning video game franchise with its enormous amount of products that the franchise has, in terms of merchandise and the games, and while Pokemon is often more famously known for its mainline series of games, the mobile games such as Pokemon Go also plays a factor into the revenue of the franchise.
According to AppMagic, here are the top 5 Pokemon Mobile Games as well as their respective earnings starting from the launch of each of games until now. The top 5 games are: Pokemon Go, Pokemon Masters EX, Pokemon Unite, Pokemon Quest and Pokemon Cafe Remix.
From the graph, it’s clear to see that Pokemon Go easily trumps over all the other Pokemon mobile games, with nearly 17 times higher than the second highest earning game with a total revenue of 4.5 Billion USD and with 595 Million user downloads.
This was largely due to boom in popularity that the game had during the initial release of the game back in July 2016. In the first month of the release of Pokemon Go, the game had earned a revenue of 136.4 Million USD across 60 countries.
The second top earning Pokemon mobile game – Pokemon Masters EX had a quieter start of 5.2 Million USD when it first released back in August 2019. But it was a month after the game’s release where it had it’s highest peak in terms of revenue, reaching 17 Million USD in the following month.
This was likely due to how this is the first time where Pokemon fans were able to play through a game where players get their hands on a roster of fan-favourite Pokemon Trainers through a gacha format.
And while Pokemon Unite was the latest to arrive compared to the Pokemon Quest and Pokemon Cafe Remix, the game was still able to get a higher earning in comparison to the previous two entries at 3.5 Million USD during the month that the game was launched while Pokemon Quest had a launch revenue of 1.2 Million USD and Pokemon Cafe Remix with only 271 Thousand USD.
The high surge of revenue that Pokemon Unite was able to garner up was largely due to how the game was accused of being pay to win. According to Game8, when Pokemon Unite was initially released, many players had criticised the game’s pay to win structure where upgrading the items in game that makes your Pokemon stronger had a lot of ties with spending gems in exchange, such as the item enhancers and upgrading items to the max levels.
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