Game Analysis: The winning formula behind Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket

Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket has swiftly proven to be a hit since its launch on October 30th. Developed by DeNA, the title is already making waves, generating over $120 million in gross revenue since its launch. 

In this guest post, game design expert Jakub Remiar shares an analysis of what the title has to offer, from its nostalgic appeal to its mobile-friendly gameplay. Remiar also shares the title’s monetisation strategy and how upcoming events could shape the game’s future.

The Pokémon Company is again making bold moves in the mobile market.

By releasing the “Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket” on October 30th, it seems we are witnessing a similar seismic impact on the revenue side as we saw with the Pokémon Go release in 2016.

The game has been making more than $4 million a day for more than two weeks in a row. If this holds, it will make $120 million during its launch month, making it the second biggest new mobile game of 2024 (the First being Dungeon & Fighter Mobile, which did $800 million in China’s launch month, and it is still quite unknown).

The game was actually developed by DeNA, a well-known Japanese company that had already done another Pokémon game before – Pokémon Masters EX (2019), which already has $240 million in lifetime revenue.

The team did a great job by streamlining the original physical Trading Card Game rules. Instead of 60 cards, you now only have 20 cards in your whole deck. The energy system was also simplified.

Similarly to how Hearthstone removed the lands as it was streamlining Magic the Gathering gameplay, Pocket also removed energy cards out of the deck and made it an automatic resource that is constantly given to you each round regardless of your cards.

If you go for a double-colour deck, the energy generated is randomised. Instead of six prize cards for defeating six of your opponent’s Pokémon, you now need only to defeat three, and there are no prize cards.

This trade-off of lowering the strategic depth for shorter mobile-friendly gameplay is a key adjustment for the mobile version of the original Pokémon TCG to be successful. 

The original cards were released in 1998, and you can clearly see that they are heavily using the original illustrations from that era, which will appeal to the current 30+ “sleeper” Pokémon fans. Precisely the same as they were activated in 2016 with the release of Pokémon GO. The demand to relive this childhood fantasy is just too strong.

Even though the current simplified gameplay may seem too simplistic to some people, keep in mind that new card expansions (the first was announced at the end of January) will probably add more mechanics and complexity to the metagame, similar to how stadium cards were added to the physical TCG, for instance. So, being this simple is a great starting point, as it will get more complex soon.

The game already has a pretty robust single-player experience, which is reinforced by a drop event. In this event, players can compete against an increasingly strong Lapras deck, which rewards them with exclusive promo cards.

On the other end, a PvP event is currently running, which rewards cosmetics for cumulative wins. This was very needed, as a proper PvP ranking and incentives are currently missing from the game, but they are to be added soon. This is also one of the big strengths of Pocket. It has a super-packed live ops pipeline.

It has already leaked accidentally, so we can see that multiple events will be running simultaneously, not only now but also during Black Friday, Christmas, and New Year, all the way to that next expansion announced at the end of January.

There will even be a mini-expansion during Christmas, with new cards adding more mechanics to the game. It doesn’t seem that the content will run out of steam anytime soon. 

The biggest innovation that the game did is actually on the social side. The Wonder Pick mechanic lets you browse (for a limited time) through the open packs of your friends and random players, and you can pick one random card out of their pack for refreshing wonder stamina currency.

This creates a giant fomo loop, where you are constantly checking for high-rarity cards in these packs. They even monetise the packs that expired, as you can use a “rewind currency” on an already expired pack and still pick one random card.

In the current form, the whole game is much more focused on collection than the actual battle with the cards, but I think that will slowly change to around a 50/50 ratio with more updates.

The other big mystery is the trading feature, which is greyed out under the “coming soon” banner in the social hub. On November 14th, the dev team gave us a clue that trading will be limited only to some specific cards. Thankfully, no bot apocalypse will happen, as that would destroy the whole game economy.

I am guessing that no cards from the main booster packs will be tradable at all, especially not the high-rarity ones. Nevertheless, this will again boost the stickiness of this game even more, giving both group collectors and PvP players a new engagement layer to play with. 

If the card expansion addition in January is handled properly, meaning that incentives for new cards will be strong and old cards won’t be completely devalued, this game has content for years already.

I can’t even imagine the power of the cross-promotion events for this game by literally having the strongest IP in the world. This is not only a “Japan” thing, as the US already has more than 20% of the overall revenue.

In order for Pokémon TCG Pocket to really achieve its full form, we should be watching how it will handle those two crucial events in the coming months – the implementation of the trading feature and the execution of the second big card set. Assuming these will be done properly, we could be looking at another billion-dollar mobile game that will sit unopposed in the top-grossing charts for quite a long time. 

You can check a more detailed rundown of Pokémon TCG Pocket on the Two and Half Gamers podcast.