When the Pokémon card game launched in Japan in October 1996, it was designed with Creatures, the least known of Pokémon’s three founders. Creatures has looked after the cards and the computer-graphics work ever since. It co-owns the Pokémon name in Japan with Nintendo and Game Freak, and the character copyright with them and TPC. Most recently it co-developed TCG Pocket with DeNA.
That makes Creatures the founder closest to Pokémon’s biggest business. The cards have since become TPC’s largest line, and Pocket its biggest app. Whether that boom reached Creatures is one of the most interesting open questions in Pokémon’s money, because Creatures has not published a set of accounts since 2020.
One visible year
Its only accounts on record appeared in October 2020, when it gave notice of absorbing a sister company, about six weeks before the merger took effect. They show a rich, nearly debt-free company: net profit of ¥3.9bn, about a quarter of TPC’s Tokyo profit that year, and an equity ratio of 94%. It was the year of Sword and Shield, at about 3.2–3.3× its lifetime average.
That notice was required. A company absorbing another must put its balance sheet in the official gazette with the merger notice. In every other year the gazette indexes fully cover, the years to March 2018 through March 2025, no notice has turned up, and no online route has been found, so Creatures, as Game Freak does, appears to skip the yearly notice the law asks for and publish only when a merger makes it.
Like Game Freak, Creatures is paid for its work, not through its stake. TPC’s dividends explain at most 7.1% of its retained earnings, and its profit was 3.7× what a cost-plus fee would leave on an assumed cost per head. Creatures’ own staff chart suggests it had fewer people in 2020 than that estimate assumes, which only widens the gap. Something linked to sales, or very rich fees, is paying it.
How big a royalty could be
TPC’s reported operating margin, and the margin before any royalty to the founders up to the estimated maximum.
- Margin before a royalty at the most it could be (16.6% of sales)
- Reported operating margin
No royalty to the founders is on record. If there is one, it is capped.
Built from and .Show the numbers
| Year | Margin before a royalty at the most it could be (16.6% of sales), % of sales | Reported operating margin, % of sales | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | |||
| 2022 | |||
| 2023 | |||
| 2024 | |||
| 2025 | |||
| 2026 |
Margin before a royalty at the most it could be (16.6% of sales). Our estimate of the ceiling: it assumes TPC’s profit is split pro rata between its owners, the founders’ other work at least breaks even and a constant rate since 2020, and rests on Creatures’ profit for the year to March 2020. An upper bound, not an estimate of a payment: no document shows one.
Reported operating margin. Tokyo parent, from the filed accounts.
Did the boom reach it?
Since that notice, yearly card printing has more than doubled and Pocket has launched. The scale is striking: each one per cent of TPC’s card revenue today would equal about 0.6–0.9× Creatures’ whole last visible profit. How Creatures is paid decides how much of that reached it. If it earns flat fees that grow with its staff, its profit would have grown with its headcount, which its staff chart puts at 1.9–2.3× the 2020 level. On that path its latest profit would be about twice the ¥3.9bn of 2020. If half its profit follows the value of cards sold, our model puts it nearer ¥13–15bn. Tied to the number of cards printed alone, half would give about ¥9–10bn, close to the flat-fee path, so a profit in that region would not settle the question.
Pocket adds a second clue. In the year it launched, TPC’s gross margin fell by more than eight points, and its cost of sales has since grown faster than its sales. If part of that extra cost is Creatures’ share as co-developer, Creatures’ profit would now be several times the last one anyone saw. That rests on a credit line and arithmetic; the cost could equally be paid to DeNA, to all three founders, or for something else.
The Pocket-year margin break
TPC’s Tokyo company: gross margin by year.
TPC’s gross margin fell sharply in the year Pocket launched. Who was paid the difference is not disclosed.
Built from .Show the numbers
| Year | Gross margin, Tokyo parent, % of sales | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | ||
| 2022 | ||
| 2023 | ||
| 2024 | ||
| 2025 | ||
| 2026 |
Gross margin, Tokyo parent. Sales less the direct cost of sales, as a share of sales; parent company only. Pocket launched in October 2024, inside the year to February 2025; whether TPC books it gross or net is unconfirmed, so no mechanism is claimed.
What it adds up to
Creatures designed the card game in 1996 and still develops it, and it co-built TCG Pocket. In its one visible year it was a rich company paid for its work rather than its stake. Since then the cards and Pocket have become TPC’s biggest businesses, and Creatures has gone quiet. It is the cleanest test of whether the card boom stayed inside TPC or reached the companies that own the Pokémon name.