It’s been more than a year and a half since Pokémon TCG Pocket was released to much fanfare, but the game’s active users have been falling drastically in recent times, as of August 2026. DeNA (the devs behind the game) have reported their company’s April-June quarter financial numbers, and it’s looking bleak, and the business has hit rough waters.
The sales revenue for the company fell a shocking 33.2% year-on-year to 12.12 billion yen, and profits took a nosedive of up to 62.0% year-on-year to 3.826 billion yen. Aside from the concerning revenue and profits, it has also been primarily that the average Monthly Active Users (MAU) for TCG Pocket, which was a decent 39 million during the same period last year, has now significantly dropped to 23 million in the current quarter.
DeNA has taken responsibility for the dismal performance and plans to adopt several corrective measures, including events and promotions, to improve login frequency, player retention rates, and overall engagement.
Players took to Reddit to voice their frustrations, calling the devs “super lazy” and slamming the repetitive events. A user wrote, “Do they not see how boring their season poke all emblems look when all they’re doing is changing the color? What about the stupid logo that most every promo card has; they don’t see that as stupid and tasteless? What about the inability to trade every card, or how expensive trading is in general or how inconvenient the process is to share and trade cards? Or how the pull rates are garbage? Surely they see how uninteresting and repetitive wonder picks are? Or what about how everything is just bogged down through unnecessary reconfirmation screens throughout the UI.”
Another added, “It’s been the same monthly cycle for so long, and it’s boring. I know we’ll get a community week, promo event, Chansey card event, Ranked, etc. There’s nothing to intrigue me.”
Regarding battles, a player mentioned, “Ex odds are trash, making it impossible to play with new decks.” Additionally, this frequent dry spell of events and card pulls has become so annoying that one commented, “I remember looking forward to opening packs and doing a few battles each day. Now I won’t even open the app most days.”
At the time of writing this article, the game is hosting the B4 major expansion titled Ruler of the Skies, a set headlined by Mega Rayquaza. However, despite rave reviews of the artwork and a bunch of meta-relevant EX and Trainer cards, the mundane nature of the game’s player progression has left many weary and eager for improvements as promised by DeNA.
