The Pokemon Company Reveals New Lifetime Game Sales Number

gameranx.com:

The lifetime sales of a video game can help determine just how successful or unsuccessful a title is. For example, gamers rushed to get it if it sold millions in its first week or two. If it sold millions over its lifetime, it was more of an “evergreen” title that consistently did well. When you process the lifetime sales of an entire series of games, you can see whether the franchise has grown over the years or whether certain titles stand out from the rest. For example, the Pokemon Company dropped some updated numbers for their pocket monsters games, showing people still love the franchise.

As noted by the insider tweet below, the lifetime sales of Pokemon games have gone over 480 million units. That’s not just staggering. That’s a number that’s truly hard to comprehend. It’s true that most titles in the franchise do well, but to reach that number? It’s beyond impressive. Plus, as the tweet also states, Gen 9 is officially over 20 million units sold, which came out in November.

Pokémon Company revealed that as of March 2023 they've sold 480m units of Pokémon software lifetime. This is an increase of 40m units vs. the previous year. 20+ m is due to Scarlet/Violet, but it's truly a staggering number.Most game companies won't sell 40m units ever. pic.twitter.com/1AWPIrTEdD

But that also means that another 20 million came from the other games in the franchise, specifically on the Switch and 3DS, more than likely, and that means that the franchise also continues to be an evergreen line that people will pick up when they get a new system.

Plus, you have to factor in that these numbers probably don’t account for the mobile games, as those are free to download. If we added those, they might be close to a billion in “game