Pokémon Legends: Arceus cumulative unit sales worldwide 2022-2023

Released on January 28, 2022, Pokémon Legends: Arceus sold more than 1.4 million physical launch units in Japan and had reached 14.83 million global unit sales as of March 2023. The latest entry in the long-running Pokémon franchise outsold other recent titles in the series on their launch weekends. This fact is even more impressive because Pokémon Legends: Arceus is a single version game and other Pokémon games usually feature two versions of the same game.

Gotta catch em all!

The Pokémon gaming series is one of the biggest gaming franchises worldwide with over 440 million games sold as of June 2022. The core games are released in generations, each with different Pokémon, characters, and sometimes new regions. Announced in February 2022 and released in November 2022, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet were the first games of the upcoming ninth Pokémon generation.
The original first-generation games, Pokémon Red, Pokémon Blue, and Pokémon Green were released for the Gameboy in 1998 and still hold the top spot as the best-selling Pokémon games of all time. However, the 2019 release of gen 8 games Pokémon Sword and Shield for Nintendo Switch has turned out to be the most popular of the most recent releases in the series. The Sword/Shield game duo is currently ranked second with over 24.27 million game units sold.

Pokémon GO – a mobile success story

Virtual Pokémon battles in real-world locations via smartphone? Almost too good to be true and yet Pokémon GO delivered on the highly anticipated concept when it was released in 2016. The augmented reality (AR) game was an instant hit on mobile and still generated over 645 million U.S. dollars in annual in-app purchase revenues in 2022. The game is credited with bringing AR gaming into the mainstream and promoting simple physical exercise but has also been criticized for contributing to accidents as users have not been paying attention to their surroundings while playing.