In 2016 the Pokémon World Championships were closed to the public. About 3,000 players, families and staff were in the building. Ten years later, in San Francisco, Worlds drew more than 50,000.
Pokémon’s tournaments, for the card game and the video games, have turned from a players’ event into a ticketed festival. In the West, TPC’s Western arm is now pricing that festival to pay for itself. At company scale it is still tiny, and TPC files it under promotion. Whether events make or lose money cannot be seen, because the only cost ever published is the prize money.
From tournament to festival
The clearest sign is the price of watching. Spectators at Worlds in London in 2022 paid a flat fee: “The registration fee for spectators of all ages is £10.” In San Francisco in 2026, an adult multi-day pass cost $120, or $150 with the final day. Playing got dearer too, more slowly. Entry to a Regional championship in the adult division went from about $20 in 2013 to $80 in 2025, while the fee for children fell. Watching Worlds now costs more than entering a Regional.
Watching now costs more than playing
Adult multi-day Worlds badge against the adult Regional entry fee, US dollars.
- Worlds adult multi-day spectator badge
- Regionals Masters entry fee
- Estimate
The spectator badge now costs more than entering a Regional. In 2022, the year before this chart begins, it cost about a tenth of today’s price.
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| Year | Worlds adult multi-day spectator badge, $ | Regionals Masters entry fee, $ | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | – | ||
| 2023 | (13–14) | ||
| 2024 | no figure | ||
| 2025 | |||
| 2026 | – |
Worlds adult multi-day spectator badge. 2022 (London, £10) is not drawn because the trainer’s notes holds no dollar figure for it; 2023 (Yokohama, ¥2,000) is converted, an estimate. 2026 is “from $120” and includes Pokémon XP, a commemorative badge and two card packs, so it is not like-for-like. The $150 Championship Sunday pass is not drawn.
Regionals Masters entry fee. One event a year, set by the organiser: Baltimore 2022, Pittsburgh 2023 (includes sales tax), Las Vegas November 2025 (the latest). Gdansk 2024 (€60) is not drawn because it has no dollar figure in the trainer’s notes; Vancouver, March 2025, was $70.
The money followed. On our estimates, ticket sales at Worlds were a small fraction of the prize pool in 2023 and 2024, about level with it in 2025, and in 2026 reached between nearly two and three and a half times the $2m pool. The prize pool has stayed at that level since 2024.
Tickets overtake prizes
Worlds prize pool against estimated ticket sales, $ million.
- Prize pool
- Ticket sales (our estimate)
- Estimate
In 2026, for the first time, ticket sales covered the prize money several times over.
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| Year | Prize pool, $m | Ticket sales (our estimate), $m | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | (0.1–0.2) | ||
| 2024 | (0.2–0.6) | ||
| 2025 | (0.9–2.7) | ||
| 2026 |
Prize pool. As announced: 2023 “over $1m” is a single capture the trainer’s notes flags as unreliable; 2024 “over $2m” is a floor; 2025 and 2026 $2m.
Ticket sales (our estimate). Attendance times published prices, before free badges and venue or ticketing shares, so not the company’s revenue. 2026 includes Pokémon XP tickets. In 2026 tickets were 1.9–3.5 times the prize pool; that does not show Worlds pays for itself, as other costs are unknown.
Who it is for
Worlds used to be for the players. In 2016 about 1,600 of the roughly 3,000 people in the room were competing. Ten years later the crowd had grown more than tenfold, and the number competing, about 2,700 in 2026, had not even doubled. TPCi’s director of esports and events gives the same picture for the two San Francisco events: players up about 1.8×, attendees up about 12.5×. Everything else about the event has been built for the people who come to watch.
The crowd grew, the field did not
People at the Pokémon World Championships: everyone attending, and the players competing.
- Everyone attending
- Players competing
- Estimate
The players are now a small part of a much larger crowd.
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| Worlds | Everyone attending, people | Players competing, people | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | (1,500–1,700) | ||
| 2017 | no figure | no figure | |
| 2018 | no figure | no figure | |
| 2019 | no figure | no figure | |
| 2020 | no figure | no figure | |
| 2021 | no figure | no figure | |
| 2022 | no figure | no figure | |
| 2023 | no figure | no figure | |
| 2024 | |||
| 2025 | |||
| 2026 |
Everyone attending. The 2026 figure counts unique visitors across Worlds and the Pokémon XP fan event held alongside it. No counts were found for 2017–2023, so the lines join the years on record.
Worlds is by invitation, so its field can only grow as fast as TPC hands out places. Below it, the number of people playing has grown a great deal. On rosters compiled by Limitless, a third-party results site, the median Regional championship in the West had 470 players in the adult division in the 2018/19 season and about 1,912 in 2025/26, from a similar number of events. These are entries, not people, since one player can enter several Regionals, and the growth came in steps rather than at a steady rate. In Japan, TPC says the shops in its Pokémon Card Gym network ran about 130,000 events in 2019 and about 300,000 a year by May 2026, roughly 2.3× as many. That too counts events, not players, but both measures point the same way.
Below Worlds, the field grew
Players in the adult division at the median Western Regional championship, by season. Entrants as listed by a third-party results site.
The median Regional has about four times the adult field it had before the pandemic. No Regionals were held in 2020/21.
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| Play! season | Median Regional, adult (Masters) division, players | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2016/17 | ||
| 2017/18 | ||
| 2018/19 | ||
| 2019/20 | ||
| 2021/22 | ||
| 2022/23 | ||
| 2023/24 | ||
| 2024/25 | ||
| 2025/26 |
Median Regional, adult (Masters) division. Entrants per event as listed by Limitless, a third-party results site, not unique players. No Regionals were held in 2020/21, and 2019/20 was cut short. Between 14 and 33 events a season; 25 in 2018/19 and 26 in 2025/26.
Four groups now share the event.
The players. Worlds sits at the top of a pyramid. At the bottom are League Challenges and League Cups, small tournaments in local game shops whose organisers set their own fees and prizes. Above them come Regionals, Internationals and, by invitation, Worlds. Neither TPC nor its Western arm publishes a count of card players: their corporate and player-registration pages give no number of registered players, members or entrants. The figure of about seven million registered players that is sometimes quoted comes from a third-party article. It describes sign-ups for official events, not active players, and its source note points to TPCi’s general card-game page rather than to a published count. In Japan, playing at the top is rationed: the 2026 national championships had a few thousand card-game seats, allotted by lottery. Places at the Champions Leagues, TPC’s large Japanese card tournaments, are also drawn by lottery, and TPC has kept adding them. The adult division of the Tokyo event was announced with 1,500 seats for 2020 and 5,000 for 2025. TPC’s one count of people at these events is that each brings together over 7,000 players. Seats and entrants at a capped event measure what TPC chooses to supply, not how many people play.
The families. The event is priced to let children in. An under-18 pass cost from $70 and came with two packs of cards. Children’s entry fees for Regional championships fell by almost half in two years, while the adult fee quadrupled over twelve. Even so, the players are mostly adults: the two children’s divisions together were about 16% of Regional entrants in 2025/26. Pokémon’s own results for North American Regionals give much the same picture earlier: 16% in 2022/23 and 14% in 2023/24, with no clear trend across the events we could read. The number of children taking part still rose wherever the same Regional ran twice.
The adult fans. Adults pay the most, to watch as well as to play, and many come to shop. In 2026 the event ran alongside Pokémon XP, an exhibition of licensees’ products, and at the 2025 event the on-site Pokémon Center shop needed no badge at all, just a timed slot, with a lottery for the most wanted items. Many of these adults are collectors rather than players: in a US survey, only a quarter of adults who bought Pokémon cards for themselves played the game.
The viewers at home. The biggest audience watches from home. Worlds streams only on TPC’s own Twitch and YouTube channels, with no broadcast deal. Over two days in 2024 it drew about 2.8m hours of viewing, about a sixth of it through fans re-streaming the event on their own channels. TPC does not pay them, but it lets them earn: its guideline allows co-streamers to monetise through the platforms and to take sponsors outside 9 barred categories, such as gambling, alcohol and crypto.
The prices tell the same story as the crowd. Adults pay more to watch than to compete; children are let in cheaply; the players’ prize pool has stayed flat while the spectator pass has climbed. Worlds is now run for fans, and the competition is the show they come to see.
Japan does it differently
Japan keeps the older model. Its national championships in 2026 drew more than 20,000 visitors, with free viewing rationed by lottery, and charged nothing at the gate. No cash prize was found; winners took trophies and places at Worlds.
A promotion with a prize line
TPC files the whole programme under promotion, and TPC’s Western arm sets “zero-based annual event budgets”, built from scratch each year. At company scale it barely registers. The ticket income TPC can claim, from Worlds and the international championships, is at most a quarter of one per cent of its revenue. The 2026 season’s stated cash prizes come to $7.5–10.6m or more once UNITE’s regional leagues are counted, which earlier tallies missed. On our estimate that is about 0.7–1.1% of TPC’s operating profit. The other costs, venues, staff and travel, are unpublished, so whether events make or lose money cannot be seen.
The one game whose full prize tables TPCi’s own pages show is Pokémon UNITE. They match, to the dollar, the Worlds top three that the esports press reported, $220000, so the press breakdown of the Worlds pool by game can be trusted. UNITE’s Worlds table totals $500000: if the $2m pool includes UNITE, it is 25% of it. Across its whole 2026 series, which TPCi describes as “over $1,000,000 USD in prizes”, the tables add up to about $1.1m, if each of the three regional leagues pays out its own table.
Most of UNITE’s 2026 prize money is at Worlds and the regional leagues
Pokémon UNITE Championship Series 2026, team prizes by event, US$ thousand.
The international championships carry little. The regional leagues are counted as three leagues at $160k each; read as a single table they would be a third of that, and Worlds and the leagues would still hold most of the money.
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| Event | UNITE prize money, 2026, $k | Source |
|---|---|---|
| World Championships | ||
| Regional Leagues | ||
| Europe International | ||
| North America Intl. | ||
| Latin America Intl. |
UNITE prize money, 2026. Team prize tables as printed on TPCi’s UNITE Championship Series page; alternates’ prizes excluded. The Regional League table is read as one per league, three leagues; read as a single table it would be $160k and the series total $785k rather than $1.1m. The headline holds either way.
UNITE is closing: the game ends service on 23 March 2027. Without its lines, and with nothing moved to the other games, the like-for-like 2027 floor is $6.4–9.5m. At around one per cent of operating profit, that reads as a choice about which games to back, not a saving.
Whether the season as a whole hands the community more cash than TPC takes back in tickets is still open. Our band for 2026 runs from TPC taking in $0.9m more than it pays out, to paying out $6.1m more. The prize tables for the card game, the video game and GO at the international and regional events are not on TPCi’s pages, and they, not UNITE, will settle it.
How winners are paid
Prizes are paid in US dollars, by TPCi through third-party administrators, and the 2026 announcements say they are “subject to applicable tax withholding”. The only written terms found are older, from TPCi’s 2019 payment guide: winners from outside the US have 30% deducted at source, which they can reclaim under a tax treaty. UNITE’s 2025 rules add that a signed affidavit is due within 10 days or the prize is forfeit. On the 2019 terms, a non-US player who wins UNITE’s individual first prize at Worlds has $6k withheld and keeps $14k up front, or about $12.7k if California’s withholding also applies at a San Francisco Worlds. That is a cash-flow cost more than a final one, and it weighs on teams from outside the US.
Who else gains
Much of the value of the events lands outside TPC’s accounts. Host cities publish large estimates of visitor spending for events they did not pay for. Hawaii’s tourism authority recorded a large economic impact from Worlds 2024 in Honolulu, and said plainly: “HTA didn't help fund this event”. The exhibitors at Worlds are Pokémon’s own licensees, “LEGO, Santa Cruz, Crocs, Funko” among them, on terms nobody has published.
Pokémon GO Fest, run by GO’s operator, shows the same gap at a larger scale. Commissioned studies credit each host city with tens of millions of dollars of visitor spending, while in-park tickets took in a small fraction of that. That money is the operator’s, and TPC’s share of it is not known.
Impact claims and tickets
GO Fest 2024: visitor spending credited to each host city by commissioned studies, against in-park ticket sales.
The studies credit host cities with far more than the tickets ever took in.
Built from and .And fans do much of the marketing for free. TPC’s Japanese terms take a “royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable” licence to fan works, and co-streamers, whom TPC does not pay, carried about a sixth of Worlds viewing in 2024.
The tolerance has edges, and TPC’s own company polices some of them. GitHub publishes the copyright takedown notices it receives, and in its record since 2016 two of the six notices naming Pokémon came from TPC’s Western arm itself: one signed by its own paralegal against a browser extension in 2016, one from its law firm, writing “on behalf of The Pokémon Company International”, against a Pokémon GO map app in 2017. The other four were Nintendo’s, against copies of the games and a fan-game engine. None naming Pokémon has appeared there since 2020, which says more about where enforcement happens than how much of it there is.
What it adds up to
Pokémon’s events are a brand engine with a prize budget, not a second card business. Worlds is now an event for fans more than for players: a few thousand compete, while tens of thousands of families and adult collectors come to watch, shop and open packs. Beneath it, the playing base has grown: the typical Regional field has roughly quadrupled since before the pandemic, and Japan’s card gyms run more than twice as many events as in 2019. In the West, TPC’s Western arm has quietly priced Worlds to the point where tickets cover the prizes, while the company still describes the whole thing as promotion. The money is small either way, and much of the value goes to host cities, licensees and the fans who stream it.