Pokémon TCG Pocket surpasses $1bn in just over 200 days

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Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket has surpassed $1 billion in gross player spending in under seven months.

The hit mobile card game reached this major milestone on May 22nd, 2025, according to AppMagic estimates, 204 days on from its global launch last year. This makes it the series’ fastest game to enter the mobile unicorn club on a gross player spending basis, ahead of Pokémon Go’s 282 days to reach $1bn.

In fact, Pokémon Pocket has even beaten the likes of Scopely’s Monopoly Go to the unicorn club, with this fellow post-pandemic mobile titan having taken 218 days to enter. Pocket has come slightly shy of HoYoverse’s Genshin Impact’s 178 days, however.

The Pokémon Company, DeNA and Creatures Inc released Pokémon TCG Pocket on October 30th, 2024 to immediate success, recapturing Go-esque lightning in a bottle with over 10 million downloads and $43.6m generated in its first week across Google Play and the App Store.

Achieving the second-strongest mobile launch in the Pokémon franchise, TCG Pocket went on to earn $232.4m in its first 30 days and helped to drive DeNA’s games profits up by more than 8,000% in Q3.

Through the power of 90s nostalgia and playground-style rumours, Pocket ended 2024 as the year’s third most lucrative new mobile game industry-wide.

Sustaining success

In 2025, Pokémon Pocket has officially surpassed 100m installs and sustained player interest, with a “very high retention rate compared to other DeNA games”.

The publisher previously shared that a large number of players have signed up to its paid subscription service, allowing them to open one extra pack of cards per day while ensuring regular income for the game.

Pokémon Pocket also celebrated its sixth-month anniversary this April with in-game events and a new expansion pack, Celestial Guardians. Having consistently launched a new expansion pack each month – adding a wide range of new cards for players to collect – Pocket has sustained spending momentum better than even AR goliath Pokémon Go.

As a result, Pocket ultimately outearned Go by 14% over their respective first six months, making the trading card game the best-performing mobile entry in the Pokémon series on a first half-year basis.

Gotta catch ‘em all

Despite keeping stronger momentum than Pokémon Go, TCG Pocket hasn’t yet managed to repeat its own initial high of $236.4m in November 2024. Player spending fell to $183.9m in December and $103.7m this January, Pocket’s worst full month yet.

However, the game returned to growth in February, up to $139.9m off the back of the Space-Time Smackdown expansion, which added 207 new cards including popular Pokémon and characters like Lucario, Dialga and Cynthia. This was the game’s largest expansion since launch – at least until Celestial Guardians on April 30th.

Player spending remained stable in March at $138.3m before declining to $104m in April. Even so, TCG Pocket was still the most lucrative mobile game in Japan during Golden Week 2025.

And notably, Pokémon Pocket’s worst month yet, January, still averaged $3.3m in daily player spending – a significant sum in the broader industry context. In its best month, November, the title averaged $7.9m per day.

Data suggests that Pocket’s most lucrative single day was January 30th, when players spent $11.8m in-game.

Now, Pokémon TCG Pocket has entered the unicorn club as it continues to experiment with new strategies – such as its first paid-only card, Shiny Mewtwo, and a limited-time event reward, Full-Art Rayquaza.

The latter can only be obtained by players who win 50 battles during May 2025, encouraging collectors to increase their playtime and engage with the combative side of TCG Pocket to earn themselves a rare, fan-favourite Legendary Pokémon.

Whether this aim to boost playtime will ultimately drive more revenue long-term remains to be seen, but either way, Pokémon TCG Pocket’s entry into the unicorn club has been a fast one indeed.