‘Pokemon Masters’ Is Shaping Up To Be A Hit With $25 Million In Week 1 Revenue

Sensor Tower

Sensor Tower

Nintendo’s mobile offerings have been hit or miss over the past few years with monsters like Pokemon GO and disappointments like Super Mario Run. But Pokemon Masters, the new mobile game which focuses on collecting trainers as well as Pokemon, is shaping up to be a hit possibly on the scale of something like Fire Emblem Heroes. And that’s because it’s monetized almost exactly the same way.

Sensor Tower is reporting that Pokemon Masters has already made $25 million in its first week of release, which is impressive because it’s nearly half of what mega-hit Pokemon GO made in its first week of release, $56 million. And yet digging a bit deeper it’s a little less impressive when you realize those figures were from GO launching in five markets, while Pokemon Masters launched in over 60.

Still, it’s clear that this one of Nintendo’s best performing mobile Pokemon titles, dwarfing the likes of Pokemon Quest or Magikarp Jump, and may go on to be one of its best performing mobile titles period, if this keeps up.

Pokemon Masters

DeNA

Why is Pokemon Masters working? Two main reasons.

First, it’s a game that DeNA has put a lot of effort into development for Nintendo with top notch animations and a fairly robust battle/story system, albeit one obviously stripped down from the handhelds. It’s using the draw of famous faces from the Pokemon franchise to get players to try to hunt down their favorite gym leaders or trainers, a new twist past collecting just Pokemon alone.

But the reason for the revenue amount is no doubt because of its model, which is very similar to Fire Emblem Heroes. It’s effectively a gacha loot box-based model where players “scout” for new trainers to join their team, and they’ll appear randomly with a certain star rank. So, in other words, you will have to shell out a load of money to hunt down high-star, top-tier trainers in the game, and many players seem content doing just that.

Pokemon GO produced massive revenue without any gacha elements or loot boxes because of its sheer scale alone. But Nintendo has struggled with other monetization models like trying to get players to pay a one-time fee for a full version of Super Mario Run, something pretty antithetical to the current mobile market. But gacha loot boxes? That’s an old trick and one that already has worked well in Fire Emblem for Nintendo, so it’s no surprise that it’s working twice, particularly in Asia where there is far less pushback about that kind of monetization. It’s simply expected.

We will see how Pokemon Masters does in the long term, but it’s performing well as GO also continues to do extremely well this late into its lifespan, grossing over $100 million last month as one of its best ever. And with Pokemon Sword and Shield out this fall, the series will continue to print more money for Nintendo than ever between all these different iterations.

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