💀 Pokémon Champions is already DEAD: here's what went wrong

basically we're saving you time not playing this.
Yeah, don't play this.
Yeah,
look at the new creatives.
You can't play this if you have full account of Pokemon home full of Pokémon.
It's rolling dice [music] with those coins.
We're the two and a half gamers. [music] The midnight crew talking UA advers and game design too. M feeling shak bringing the insight. We're rocking [music] those vibes till the early daylight. But hey, you a master eyes on the prize. Tracking data through the cyerspace [music] skies. Felix stacks like a wizard in disguise. Jack craft realms with us to the highest. Two and a half [music] gamers talking smack. Slow hockey stick got your back. Ads are beautiful. They like the way. Click it fast. [music] Don't delay. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

[music]
from Kinoa. Look, most mobile games leave serious revenue on the table and it's almost never the game. It's live ops and game ops. Kinoa is the AI operating system for mobile game operations. Flows, live segments, inner messages, push notifications, AB testing, all in one place. Real time run by the operators who actually own the numbers. No dev tickets. K first pulled plus 43% Arab play studios plus 31% revenue on Tetris block party. Same players more revenue integrated. That's Kinoa. I personally invested as well. Thank you very much for sponsoring this episode.
Welcome everybody.
Thank you so much for stopping by.
Yeah, in five minutes we're going to be done and then you can go back to your board cup as we are going to be as well. Thank you very much. My name is Mat Lancherich.
I'm Felix Bra
and I'm Rier
and we are your hosts

and we and
are going to cover Pokemon Champions.
Yes, I Yeah, it's amazing game. Amazing game.
It's so amazing that I cannot play it on my emulator.
Yeah, it's so amazing. is also already dying.
That's also [laughter]
it's also
another part of it.
Yeah.
So, um why are we covering this? Why this is happening?
I don't know.
Yeah. I just had most probably too much expectations out of this. And uh you know, we cover on this podcast everything, not only the successes, also the failures. And I guess this will be one of those failures. But let's see.
Surprised to see Pokemon having a failure.
Um I don't think so. It's having a failure. It's more of like this whole thing is basically fan service in my opinion because they just don't care because they are swimming in money and they have their 30th anniversary this year. So they can do this But
is winning one zero.
Mhm.

Yeah. Penalty kick. Anyway, so uh during our uh nice tutorial, thanks anonymous YouTuber, uh that you are seeing on the screen, uh this game is some kind of a complete anomaly from the standpoint of usual free-to-play practices or whatever mobile games practices that should be done there. And I'm just like baffled by like, okay, why why why why did you even do this? It's like cuz like Okay,
maybe it's a social casino on boarding.
No, it's not a social
open the game and then close the game immediately.
Yeah. So, the
the main thing and or maybe maybe let's just go into the game. So, how this game works is basically just the battler. If you're familiar with the old Pokemon game called Pokemon Stadium on PlayStation or the consoles, it's basically a better version of that game. Or maybe it's not because that game was a premium game that you can pay and have everything in it.
Yeah. And

um and in that game, maybe I can get game play. Uh you would be just uh fighting Pokemon. And I mean literally just fighting, nothing else. So it's uh you throwing. Yeah. Here we are. Just so we can have some bit of a nostalgia. Yeah.
Oh, those are the Pokemons I care about.
Yeah, exactly. Uh, so this is actually Nintendo 64. So the game looks like this. Literally, I remember playing it like vividly.
Yeah, this was a great game.
Yeah, this was a great game. I love this game. It's
Yeah. When you take your Pokemon, like your Game Boy Pokemon and put them on the N64 and you're like, "No way."
Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. So, you would go here and you would just play the match and you would pretty much just battle with your Pokemon and that's it. And there would be some like a little bit of crap on top of it, but not really any progressions or whatever. Something

crap. [laughter]
You know what I'm talking about.
There was no meta basically. It was just battling And
basically after playing this for like two weeks, you're like, I'm kind of bored of this.
Yes. Yeah. That was the games back then. Like you bored after two weeks? No worries. We have new because games were sold as premium.
So yeah. So this is Pokemon Stadium. This is Pokemon Champions. So what's happening here is exactly the same thing. Yeah.
So we have Pokemon that battle each other uh by choosing abilities that are effective, super active, extremely effective, non-effective, and so on so forth. They have HP, and you just need to defeat the three Pokemons of your opponent.
I think you would just choose body slam. Yeah, by the way, body slam is the best thing in the world cuz [laughter] just check the animation. Like, [laughter] man, I played this tutorial on mobile phone. I just I just selected

Snorlax, killed everybody with bodies because it's effective on every single Pokemon type. So, good. Anyway, so you battle again, usual kind of things applies. You know, if you bring a water Pokemon to a fight with a fire Pokemon, you win so on. Sorry, Charizard. Blah blah blah. And then you win these battles. And again, all these things applies. People Pokémon even have like items they can hold which triggers. You can switch them if you know like this is the other one that you need to counter blah blah blah. Rock, paper, scissors. We all know these things. don't really need to talk about it more. Afterwards comes the acquisition part. So, how do we get more Pokémon in this game or like what's the thing? So, actually there's no explorations, no gyms, no story, no breeding, no catching Pokemon in the wild. What we have is this marvelous Pokemon wrench where [laughter]

there's kid Howdy. He's there and what she gives you is this um let's say
fork
no is version of gacha because because what's happening here that you go here and this is the tutorial and you can like meet a new lineup of Pokemon. So what does mean new lineup of Pokemon? It means that uh shitty animation plays in which is the gacha opening. This was it. And then what's happening? You can choose one out of 10 Pokemon and buy it direct. Perfect.
They took the best part of the game and just ruined it.
Exactly. Because again, this whole thing is based on like fairness and like no power progression, no pay to window, no, nothing. So again, what you're doing, you're slowly building up these things

and uh in the beginning for instance, of course, you get like a one free free pick basically. So yeah, I picked Snorlax for sure
obviously.
Uh so what you do here, you have these Yeah, perm recruitment unlimited. This is just because of tutorial. Trial recruitment, you can if you have these tickets, you can like have it for seven days. and permanent recruitment normal, which is like you need these tickets, which basically means like you need to grind points and that's it. And this is how you get pretty much everybody. It's it's quite easy. So it's nothing really to it because
why would they cut that out?
Huh?
Why Why would we even talk about this then?
Yeah, I don't know, man. Like it's
What do you mean? I I don't know. Like you told you told me like let's go Pokemon Champions like Yeah, fine. It was making 300k a day.
Yeah, for two days. was
yes for two days. As I said, we need to talk also about failures. So again, you see there's uh this kind of a pool of Pokémon that's from June 17 to

September.
Say regular rooster. Regular rooster.
Exactly. And uh maybe he even clicks on on the info button.
Yeah. This game is dying quicker than
Yeah. Is it dead?
Yeah. Like Yeah. It's dying quicker than Slowpoke. This is dying quicker than a Finnish summer. [laughter]
So you see our growers rooster and uh Russ and and again we just pick this up and then pick one out of this. And you see these points called VP. So you need to pay uh blah blah blah blah blah. You need to pay 2 and a halfk of these points to recruit one. And that's it. And if I understand correctly, the only modification is that there's these like u what is it stat alignment which can be a little bit better or worse, but it's still like very very small impact and that's it. Then
how does this game basically go down from like 3k to 300k a day or 400k a day

on launch
easy to basically 80 now and then basically the daily active users is the same.
Oh, hello. Hello there. I didn't see you. Thank you very much for coming to this episode. Uh it's brought to you by our sponsors, PVX Partners, the simplest and most effective credit line for marketing. If you're scaling your business uh and need funding, here's the deal. With PVX Partners, you can grow your game easily and your business. There's no equity dilution. You can repay as you get paid, and it's flexible and fully tailored to your growth. So, you can secure funding in 30 days and get a term sheet in just 24 hours. Don't you wait. take control of your UA budget without giving away uh a piece of your company. Visit pvxpartners.com and uh see how they can help you grow your game faster and stronger. Don't wait. Go to pvxpartners.com. I'll
get to it. I'll get to it. There's This is still not the worst part by neutering

the gacha. They did even worse things. So, it's the reps for
Pikachu. Pikachu dies. No, Pikachu can't die. So what's happening here is again this is like the the basic battling system. We don't really need to talk about this like it's just like this is the whole core like you just battle stuff on like
where's the this is the main menu. Where is the main menu?
Where is it? Yeah. Lots of cosmetics that are like completely meaningless and even like from their standpoint that they're like meaningless. Uh this is team building stuff and yeah this is the main menu. So you have daily missions and daily quests is normal stuff. Mailbox normal stuff. Style is just cosmetic. Submen is just settings. Recruit you seen the ranch already. Battle you seen already. Box is like you select a team of Pokemon. Train it's like tutorial missions and shop. You can

buy cosmetics. That's it there. Like ton of them. You can buy the battle pass or season pass or however you call it and you can buy uh if I understand refresh tickets on the ranch because the ranch in order to get the new lineup it takes like 22 hours but you can buy tickets to refresh it again so you can recruit again and that's it. And again you've seen the whole game and then comes the biggest problem of this all which is Pokemon home import. So, for those of you not uh familiar with this marvelous thing, which is in my opinion great, there's this app called Pokemon Home, which ties up the whole Pokemon ecosystem. You can catch Pokémon in Pokémon Go and import them to Pokemon Home and then use them in other game such as this one. Which means that people don't even need to grind these Pokémon if they already have them in Pokémon Go. They just move them

over here, play with them here, and then move them back. Which I don't need to stress how much this will damage the economy of the game if you can just take the content from a different game. This is literally the web three interoperability in its play. Like this is what would happen.
This doesn't seem very thought out. Uh, as I said, it seems to me this is all just some kind of a like we can do this because we love the community, so we'll give them this game basically for free because the monetization is just so shallow that there's nothing to monetize. Like once you buy the battle pass and all the cosmetics, there's nothing else to buy. You can't even, you know, power your way through this. Like what what what you would power through. Like you get these guys faster. Some guys already have them all because they have Pokemon Home and they were having them all on the launch
like a new uh one of the new Supercell games.

Like I don't know. There's there's nothing to it. And and like yeah, it's it's just like a fan service game. Like you can go and battle with your Pokemon if you want. And by the way, it's also on Nintendo Switch. Maybe there it's doing something because I'm guessing that Nintendo Switch is the like extremely core audience of this. But here on mobile, uh this will just die very very fast. So if we actually look at the chart of this game, it looks as shark fin as usual because again I was I guess I was expecting more for this game unfortunately. So we have this
um I cannot put it on top. Yeah, whatever. I wanted to do countries anyway. Yeah. So it's mainly driven by Japan as usual.
Red.
Yeah,
blood red.
Yeah, blood red. Exactly. So launched on June 18. Again, as I said, this is like two, three months after the Switch

version that was already floating around. I think that was in February or somewhere. Don't know. And now we have the mobile one. Only 16% of US revenue.
Did anyone say web revenue? Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Fastpring, the no drama D2C partner that's been scaling with mobile publishers for over 20 years. They're fast growing, profitable, and seriously reliable, which is more than you can say about most vendors in this space. Anyway, whether you're launching a new web store, replacing your current D2 system, or adding a backup plan, FastPring is here for you. Visit fastpring.gg to set up your web store today. Fastpring.gg. Hello, Fastprint. Thank you very much, guys, for sponsoring this episode.
Then we have South Korea, Taiwan, Ital. So, basically only people from Japan, South Korea, and a little bit of US and that's it. So

yeah, uh nothing really to it and this is just dead and it's going to be dead uh quite soon.
I'm guessing it's going to stay.
Dude, look at the DAU. That's why I don't understand.
What do you mean dau? Ah
never seen this pattern.
Yeah, [laughter]
I call it the wet otter. Yeah, the wet otter. [laughter]
I think it's called the valley of server crash. Most probably
you know these people are playing it and they're loving it and they're demographies here or or what's happening?
It's the same same Japan is is as as strong as before. Same for us. So something happened here. I don't know. Some kind of artifact. Anyway, it's still very small and it will remain even smaller and I'm guessing some hardcore Japanese fans will stay there and let it run to the ground because there's nothing

unfortunately against it. Um, while we're talking about this, so we don't just talk about this like one thing which is like whatever.
Tell us more.
Successful games. Yeah, let's just do a recap on games that actually make money like Pokemon Sleep because
that's an alarm clock, right?
It's not alarm clock. It's a It's a virtual pet category game.
That's a good idea.
You can do so much stuff with Pokemon sleep like measure your sleep graphs, measure your drowsy power, uh you know, have all these nice things with Snorlax and stuff.
Wait, wait, wait. is tracking a virtual p. I thought it was tracking your own sleep.
Of course, that's what I'm saying.
Oh, okay. Good.
It's a sleep tracker.
Oh, okay. Good.
Wrapped around a virtual pad.
Okay.
Oh, but it's still making pretty good money, man. It's doing what? Like 150k a day on a sleep.

Jesus Christ. People should work more.
See,
and have less time [laughter]
and less money. They already did 150 mil with this game in three years. See, that's why they can do this crap because their sleep app makes 150 mil. So, uh, Pokemon TCG Pocket being still the biggest one. Uh, doing 15 mil a month. Uh, just wanted to get a readout on Pokemon Go uh because this is not anymore and this was never actually on their account. So we see there and there's some kind of a big spike lately. So maybe Scopi really is pushing something there.
Oh, 10 million. I'm I'm guessing it's the anniversary because it's it's the 30th anniversary now. So I'm guessing there's some big events running currently. It's this month. So 10 million a day.
Yeah, I know. I know.
But if we go monthly again, these guys are pulling 3350.

Look at it now. It's 80.
Yeah. Yeah, it's going to be more. It's going to be a war by the end of the year as Pokemons are extremely strong still. Extremely strong in every every sense. Yeah. So, let me just look at the actual Pokemon company portfolio. So, the biggest up being TCG Pocket then Pokemon Champions, but not for so long. So, again, Leap is going to take it as number two. And uh where where did we go? Yeah, here we go. And as for the overall statistics, uh, yeah, this is what Pokemon TCG Pocket, if you take that out, again, it's the sleep stuff. Yeah, sleep stuff is still very strong as for like a core game. But again, this is just the mobile part. Think about that. Not the franchising, not the Game Boys, not the Switch Nintendos, and all these other things.
I think you need to wrap this up so we can go watch the football.
Yeah. Yeah, we're going to wrap this up. Um let me just finish. Matt, you want to do creatives?
Yeah, there is few.

Yeah,
maybe like four.
Not four but bunch.
All 300.
Basically, we're saving you time not playing this. [laughter]
Yeah, don't play this.
Yeah,
look at the new creatives.
You can't play this if you have full account of Pokemon home full of Pokemon.
Yeah, full of
It'll be quite easy. Who the does 15sec videos still?
Um, Pokemon Company is 2014.
It's the usual marketing of just let's just cut the trailer.
Yeah. Do something.
Switch post or whatever. And I mean it's 300, but it's not really 300. That is pretty much what like seven concepts. That's it. Very
against the trailer.
Yeah.
This was like one year old trailer, I think. Yeah. And it's still it's the same thing just cut in pieces
and everything is 15 seconds video.

Yeah. One is 19 [clears throat] second. Oo, this is 19 second. 21. Oh,
there's a streamer.
Oh, that's amazing. 21 and even he's looking like what the is this? What am I looking at?
Wait, does that bad with 21 seconds? Just explain for the readers.
It's very short. And these days, all of this is inactive. All these days we always produce 30 secondond and longer videos. It's better for conversion on uplavin unity on Facebook, Google everywhere. Pretty much nobody gives a crap about 15 oh below 30 second videos anymore. As longer you are there in more invested and you actually, you know, watch my micro drama apps are running like 10 minute videos.
18 minute videos and stuff. Yes, it's qualifying the users because if you watch all the whole thing and you're more likely to install and then way more likely to actually purchase afterwards. So, it's the same principle.

Whoa, this is one is 58 seconds. Thank you very much. At least one all of these. And
this was just a tutorial video.
Yeah. still we got good and I mean that's it even with 300 nothing more
we don't just get to talk about the success we also get to talk about not so much success
not so much success and this is pretty much Google and and and Facebook
I wouldn't be surprised if this actually makes some real money on the Switch if people are in the core audience, but like it still won't be that big because just like there's zero depth and actually you can cut all the depth if you have Pokemon.
Yeah. Nice. Very good. Mostly YouTube and then a little bit of the rest. That's it. This is literally it.

Big companies, they shouldn't launch anything if they don't give. It's franchising like it's
I know but it breaks my heart.
But it's very again very like suspicious if you have like literally one of the biggest gacha games on the market which is Pokemon TCG Pocket which is literally a game about opening gacha boxes nothing else then you really
doing really well like that print mint. Why don't you put like that type of gacha in in here?
Like I don't I also don't understand like why they like again maybe it's because of all that like home integration that they promised because it's it would be completely different things.
I'm sure there's a very logical reason if you worked inside of the Pokemon company and they could probably explain to you, but for someone outside it never will make sense.
Even for someone inside would never make

sense, man. Come on. This is not the first game you did. Honestly, like what these guys should do, which is like a giant problem for them. By the way, they lost. They lost again power world because power world just had one zero release. So, you don't know. And uh this is their biggest problem actually. They should have made already a giant big open world Pokemon game on PC long time ago. Yeah,
this is Power World proved that it's a giant demand for it and they're just sleeping on their laurels. Well, what can you do? I know what you can do. Don't play this game.
Yeah, it's not a bad game by It's just like this is not a free-to-play design game. It's a fun service game. As I said, it's like nice thing to have.
Great. Nice thing to have. How much money do you think they spend on on production?
A lot. Yeah. A
lot. A lot.
Yes. Exactly.
By the way, if you play now, you can get Raichu and Dragonite immediately for free.

Yeah. Yes. Why not?
They said I couldn't make ads without the dev [music] team. They said I couldn't understand the tech. Guess what? I just made a [music] fully working gorgeous top to play while eating noodles and watching trash [music] TV and taking care of my daughter. All thanks to playable making. No code, no stress, [music] no Sherlock,
what would I do with that?
Yeah, let's go. Can I can I use it in the in Maldoku? I don't think so.
I would pick
love I would love to do it. Yeah. Okay. Thank you very much guys. Um you know what you don't want to play
and we don't want to do
and we don't want to do we played it for you. So thank you very much and also thank you Yakub for bringing this amazing game to the this episode.
Bye-bye.
See you in the select channel. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.