Everyone knows that Pokémon is one of Nintendo's biggest franchises. In today's industry, few video game franchises make it past their initial release, or maybe a second entry — Pokémon, on the other hand, has been going strong for two decades now. The series has been an unqualified, global success — pretty impressive for a franchise that many deemed a fad back in the late '90s.
It'd be impossible to call the series a fad now, and Nintendo has the numbers to prove it: the publisher just revealed that, over the course of the past 20 years, the Pokémon franchise has sold a whopping 200 million copies.
The news comes via Japanese press release (translated by NeoGAF user JoeM86) — and, if such a ridiculous amount wasn't already impressive enough, Nintendo clarified that those 200 million copies only account for core entries in the franchise (games like Red & Blue, not Pokémon Stadium). Taking spin-offs into account only makes the sales numbers that much more impressive, pushing the franchise to roughly 279 million units sold.
Selling 200 million copies across 20 years is already an absolutely massive amount of games sold, but let's put it all into perspective: most games are considered "successes" if they end up selling 1 million copies in their lifetime. Counting only the core games in the series (including remakes and re-releases), Pokémon averages about 7.6 million copies sold per title. Selling 200 million copies of anything is impressive enough on its own, but a handheld RPG series hitting that many sales on a regular basis is unheard of.
For comparison's sake, the only video game franchise to sell more units than Pokémon is (unsurprisingly) Mario, with over 500 million copies sold throughout the past three decades. Thanks to the ridiculous success of Grand Theft Auto V, Rockstar's open-world crime simulator is closing the gap from third place, while Activision's yearly juggernaut Call of Duty sits at fourth place.
With numbers like these, it's clear that Pokémon isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Case in point: Pokémon Sun & Moon, the next two core entries in the franchise, are due out later this year.
