People said Pokemon was a fad. A kids’ thing. A flash in the pan that would flame out once the kids who grew up with it moved on. Thirty years later, The Pokemon Company just posted the most profitable year in the franchise’s entire history — and the numbers are genuinely staggering. This isn’t just “another good year for Pokemon.” This is a franchise that has been setting its own revenue records continuously and just cleared a bar it has never cleared before.
Here’s the full picture of what was reported for the fiscal year ending February 28, 2026.
The Numbers — All-Time Records Across the Board
According to a new filing in the Japanese government’s gazette Kanpo, The Pokemon Company’s fiscal year ended on February 28, 2026 with net sales of 531 billion yen (approximately US$3.3 billion), up 29.3% year-on-year, operating profit of 144 billion yen (approximately US$900 million), up 43.0%, and net profit of approximately US$754 million.
The net profit growth is the number that stands out most starkly: The Pokemon Company’s net profits increased by 70% over the previous year. For a franchise that was already operating at enormous scale, a 70% jump in a single fiscal year is extraordinary. To put it in longer historical context: as recently as 2021, The Pokemon Company’s annual revenue sat around $750 million. In just five years, the franchise’s revenue has more than quadrupled.
All of these are record numbers for The Pokemon Company. Every single metric — net sales, operating profit, net profit — is a franchise-high for an IP that has been commercially active for nearly three decades. That is not something that happens by accident.
What Actually Drove These Numbers?
Two products did the heavy lifting: Pokemon Legends: Z-A and Pokemon TCG Pocket. Understanding why each of them contributed so dramatically tells you a lot about where Pokemon’s strength as a brand actually lives in 2026.
Pokemon Legends: Z-A
The open-world action RPG set in Lumiose City launched during the fiscal year on both Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2, giving it an unusually wide hardware audience for a single release. In the fiscal year in question, The Pokemon Company released blockbuster Pokemon Legends: Z-A on the Nintendo Switch and continued to see ridiculous sales in its printed trading card business worldwide.
Z-A was the follow-up to Pokemon Legends: Arceus, which itself sold over 15 million copies. The Legends sub-series repositioned Game Freak’s approach to Pokemon games — faster action combat, open-world exploration, a focus on environmental storytelling — and the critical reception for Z-A reflected that the formula had been refined rather than retreaded. Landing on Switch 2 as one of the console’s first major Pokemon releases gave it the visibility boost that comes with being on new hardware, while the Switch 1 version ensured the existing installed base wasn’t left behind. That cross-generational release strategy maximized the addressable audience in a way that a single-platform release couldn’t have.
Pokemon TCG Pocket
Pokemon TCG Pocket has seen huge success, with more than 200 million downloads across mobile platforms. The game launched in October 2024, which means a substantial portion of its lifetime revenue fell within this fiscal year window as the playerbase matured and the monetization systems operated at full scale. The app is free to play with daily free card packs, but the pull rates and the draw of rare card variants have driven significant spending.
The mobile launch also had a meaningful knock-on effect on the physical TCG business. Following that digital release, marquee physical sets like Surging Sparks and Prismatic Evolutions were basically sold out on arrival. Right now, Pokemon’s biggest problem isn’t generating hype; it’s simply printing enough cardboard to keep up with demand.
That connection between digital and physical is one of the most important dynamics in Pokemon’s current business model. TCG Pocket didn’t just generate revenue on its own — it functioned as an enormous marketing engine for the physical card game, introducing collecting concepts to 200 million mobile users and converting a meaningful percentage of them into buyers of physical packs. As of March 2026, the company has printed over 85 billion cards all-time across the globe. Roughly 10 billion of those cards were printed in the past year alone. It took Pokemon a full 25 years to print their first 43 billion cards. They have matched that entire quarter-century total in just the last four years.
Pokemon Is Now a Multi-Pillar Business in a Way It’s Never Been Before
One of the most important things about these numbers is that they reflect genuine diversification rather than dependence on any single product. The old Pokemon business model was essentially: release a new mainline game every two to three years, sell a lot of copies, sell TCG sets, collect licensing revenue on merchandise. The new model has more legs under it.
The franchise now operates across multiple parallel revenue streams simultaneously:
- Switch console games — Legends: Z-A as the fiscal year driver, with Pokopia now in the market
- Mobile — TCG Pocket at 200 million downloads, Pokemon GO entering its 10th anniversary year
- Physical TCG — 10 billion cards printed in a single year, consistently sold out
- LEGO — the collaboration launched in February 2026 with a $649.99 Kanto starter trio set and multiple waves planned through the rest of the year, including the upcoming Rayquaza set with a Zinnia minifigure
- Anime — the Liko and Roy era continues with an ongoing international release cadence
- Merchandise and licensing — Pokemon Center stores expanding internationally, with licensing across virtually every consumer product category
When any single one of these pillars underperforms, the others compensate. That’s a fundamentally more resilient business than the one that existed even five years ago, and it’s a significant reason why the 70% net profit jump is a sign of structural strength rather than just a lucky year.
Pokemon GO’s 10th Anniversary
One figure that adds meaningful context to the broader picture: Pokemon GO is celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2026. The mobile augmented reality game that broke the internet in summer 2016 is still generating revenue, still running live events, and still bringing players out into the real world. GO Fest 2026 has already been announced with significant event content, including the Mega Mewtwo Unity Attack mechanic that the community has been excited about.
The fact that Pokemon GO is still a commercially relevant product a decade after launch says something important about the franchise’s ability to retain audiences over time. Most mobile games don’t survive two years, let alone ten. Niantic has managed to keep the game fresh through seasonal events, generational Pokemon additions, and community-driven content — and The Pokemon Company benefits from GO’s sustained activity both through revenue sharing and through its function as a gateway that continuously introduces new demographics to the broader franchise ecosystem.
What Does the Current Fiscal Year Look Like?
Here’s where things get genuinely interesting, because the new fiscal year — which runs March 2026 through February 2027 — doesn’t have an obvious Pokemon Legends: Z-A-sized blockbuster on the calendar. Pokemon Winds and Waves isn’t launching until 2027. The software slate for this year is lighter.
What does exist: Pokemon Pokopia, the Nintendo Switch 2-exclusive title that launched after the fiscal year’s close, has already sold over 4 million copies and received universally positive reviews. A Nintendo Switch 2 bundle featuring Pokopia is also now available, which could drive hardware-tied software sales for months. New TCG expansions are coming. The LEGO wave is expanding with multiple new sets through the summer. And TCG Pocket continues to operate with regular new sets and event content.
Whether that’s enough to sustain the momentum from the record year is a legitimate question. The absence of a mainline game the scale of Legends: Z-A creates a natural gap. That said, the previous fiscal year — ending February 2025 — was also a record year for The Pokemon Company, and it had no major console game release at all. That year was driven almost entirely by TCG Pocket’s launch and physical card sales. The franchise has demonstrated it can set records without a new Switch game, which suggests the diversified revenue model is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.
The Fad That Lasted Thirty Years
The framing of Pokemon as a fad — something that would run its course and fade with the children who discovered it — gets harder to maintain with every passing year. The franchise has now outlasted multiple gaming generations, multiple console cycles, multiple shifts in how media is consumed, and a global pandemic. It has adapted to mobile. It has expanded into physical collectibles at a scale no other entertainment property matches. It has built a card game that generates billions annually. And it’s about to add LEGO to the list of categories where it’s a market leader.
The $3.34 billion revenue year isn’t a peak — it’s a data point in a trajectory. With Pokemon Winds and Waves bringing a new mainline generation in 2027, a Pokemon movie sequel confirmed for July 2027, and the LEGO collaboration still in its first year, the mechanisms for continued growth are clearly in place. The company that printed 43 billion cards in its first 25 years and then matched that total in four years is not a franchise running out of momentum.
In other gaming and entertainment news this week, the LEGO Pokemon Rayquaza set just leaked with a Zinnia minifigure ahead of its August 1 release, the UK government is weighing new restrictions on minors interacting with strangers on gaming platforms, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is confirmed as the most classic MCU Spider-Man film yet ahead of its July 31 release, and ARC Raiders swept the Nordic Game Awards with Nordic GOTY, Best Technology, and Best Audio.
