As Pokemon Winds and Waves prepares to launch next year, the Pokemon Company reveals the series has now sold over 500 million copies

Pokemon Winds and Waves.

The Pokemon Company has announced that the lifetime sales of all Pokemon games exceed 515 million, with 26 million sold in the last year.

Don't know if anyone out there knew this, but that Pokemon thing is pretty popular. The franchise as a whole is already firmly the highest-grossing media franchise of all time, and the games consistently rank near the top of the best-sellers list on every Nintendo platform they're on (or the top overall on Game Boy and Game Boy Advance). And despite some setbacks in the games' perception after the disastrous launch of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, the series continues to sell well.

According to The Pokemon Company in its latest financial report, the "total shipments of all Pokémon-related software" have reached over 515 million units by the end of March 2026. And looking at the Wayback Machine, that marks a jump of 26 million from last year's reported number of 489 million units.

October saw the release of Pokemon Legends Z-A, the first Pokemon game on Switch 2. Of course, earlier this year, we also got Pokemon Pokopia, which became a phenomenon in its own right, and the Switch ports of Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen led to another 4 million copies sold for that effort, placing those games in the top 10 best-selling Pokemon games. What's more impressive is that these numbers only cover up until the end of March 2026, meaning Pokopia has probably sold even more, and with Nintendo announcing it sold over 4 million copies by the end of its release month.

With Pokopia's continued popularity and the release of Gen 10 with Pokemon Winds and Waves in 2027, it feels very likely that next year's gain could be even higher.

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