Make no mistake, one of the beautiful things about the Pokemon franchise is that it has a great level of diversity that can’t be ignored. In fact, it’s so good at what it does that it can be just about anything in just about any genre without much difficulty. Just look at the last few years, and you’ll see games and other media about a café featuring the pocket monsters, a concierge series on Netflix, the return of a beloved photography spinoff, and then, Pokemon Sleep. That game was announced years ago and then went silent as The Pokemon Company had to figure out what a game like it would be like.
As it would turn out, it wasn’t really a game at all, as Pokemon Sleep is more of a “sleep tracking app” that tries to help people get a deeper and more restful sleep. If they’re able to do better hours of sleep, they’ll wake up to find that new Pokemon have joined them in their virtual world. It’s a unique system that many people questioned how successful it would be.
The answer comes just before the title’s 1st anniversary, as Pocket Gamer got the data and found out that the “sleep aid” has received about $100 million in its first year. Now, while that is much less than the other apps that The Pokemon Company has, you have to remember that those ones are much more active titles with far greater microtransactions that people basically span all over the world to try and go forward in those titles. In contrast, this game is just a “sleep aid,” so the purchases one would make, or even desire to make, would be minimal. So the fact that it crossed triple digits in the revenue department in a year is astounding!
Another key thing to note about this is that there are key differences in how the money was acquired by region. In Japan, the game grossed around $75 million! That’s right, ¾ of the profit for the game came from Japan alone! Furthermore, the United States only brought in about $15 million! This further highlights how Japan has become more of a “mobile gaming society” and still loves their Pokemon, so they weren’t afraid to shell out cash to get things moving.
What will be curious is to see how things go from here. Sure, it had a big first year, but can it keep the momentum going? We’ll find out soon enough!
