In the last post, we discussed how Pokémon’s creators made fantastic decisions about their central mechanic, the Type system. A player can’t win any Pokémon battles no matter how simple without knowing the Type chart.
However, while the easiness of the Type chart shepherds all those new players through the game, it doesn’t explain why new players ought to pick up a Pokémon game in the first place. No Pokémon advertisement touts the Type chart as an innovative feature because it’s the central mechanic. It’d be like Apple making an advertisement talking about the design of their keyboards. Helpful? Yes. Intriguing to potential new customers? No. Something else was responsible for ensuring new players signed up to Pokémon’s multimedia smorgasbord.
This leads us to Pokémon’s other most famous feature: trading.
It Seems Innocuous Enough…
If you recall from the Pokémon Introduction post, you’ll know that every mainline Pokémon game is released as a pair; this tradition has not changed for almost thirty years. From Pokémon Red and Green to Scarlet and Violet, every player has the option to buy one of two nearly identical versions of the game. Nearly every player only bought one version because every video game console only had one game cartridge slot. The difference between the versions were minuscule like whether or not a city your character visits will have a futuristic aesthetic or a more retro feel.
But one version difference is HUGE: what kind of Pokémon you can catch and battle with. Some Pokémon are only found in one version of the game and not the other.
This might sound trivial until you realise what the game’s slogan is: gotta catch ‘em all. For a player armed with one console and one version of the game, catching them all is, quite simply, impossible. In the earliest games from the 1990s, this was a huge problem for players because much of the game revolved around catching one of every Pokémon available; sophisticated competitive battling would come later.
So a child who wanted to catch every Pokémon had two choices to achieve this end. The first and less likely option was to buy both versions of the game. However, the vast majority of players did NOT do this because in order to catch ‘em all, one needed not just two copies of the game but a second game console, which most parents didn’t have the money for. And even if money weren’t a factor, this single player would need to complete the game in both versions to find every version-exclusive creature and then trade the digital Pokémon back and forth between the two games.
Clearly this was impractical and lonely, so few if any players did it. But those who did increased the sales of Nintendo and the Pokémon Company because they bought two products instead of one. Needless to say, most players, armed with only one version of the game and one console, took the second route to catching them all: they turned to their friends for help.
One can see the appeal of this second method; if there is a Pokémon you like that’s exclusive to the version you don’t have, you can ask your friend on the playground if they can trade Pokémon with you.
What happens next is key to explaining Pokémon’s rapid rise and continual staying power. In the above scenario, in which Player 1 asks for help completing their Pokémon collection, Player 2 has two possible responses. In Response 1, they say “yes, let’s do a trade”, solidifying a shared experience with their friend and then planting the seeds for the enormous community that now exists today.
But in Response 2, Player 2 looks at their friend and says, “what are you talking about? What the heck is a Pokémon?” Player 1 will then explain to Player 2 what game they’ve been playing and show them how it works. Player 2 will find it extremely intriguing because that game, after all, is the reason their friend has been ignoring their playdate requests for the last month. In time, Player 2 will beg their mum to buy a console and a Pokémon game, increasing the profit share for Pokémon and adding a new convert by which the gospel of Pikachu can spread.
In other words, Pokémon’s central game mechanic has its own in-built marketing system as part of the gameplay.
Why is that significant? Because of the research done conducted on the effectiveness of advertising.
Why Advertising Doesn’t Work and Why Fans Made Pokémon What It Is
According to Hugo Mercier and his research on communication from his fantastic book Not Born Yesterday, people are not easily swayed by advertising. This is because people use what he calls 'plausibility checking'. Plausibility checking is, to use Mercier's terms, an 'open vigilance mechanism', which is how someone "evaluates messages in light of pre-existing beliefs". (Mercier 47) Every product the consumer sees in the store is judged against the consumer's preferences with the help of plausibility checking and other open vigilance mechanisms. According to Mercier, open vigilance mechanisms do this filtering of information quickly and efficiently. "When it comes to evaluating what others tell us," he writes, "open vigilance mechanisms are mostly on the lookout for cues that the message should be accepted. Absent such cues, the default is rejection." [emphasis added] (Mercier 161) Mercier further adds, "Plausibility checking is an ever-present filter, weighing on whether messages are accepted or rejected. On the whole, this filtering role is mostly negative." (Mercier 51)
So if a product, in this case a Pokémon game, offers no 'cues' that the consumer should pick it up, then the consumer will ignore it no matter how cute Pikachu is on the cover. Mercier states that some cues people use to do this filtering are questions like "Is the speaker [in this case, video game maker] likely to have reliable information? Does she have my interests at heart?" (Mercier XVI)
The latter question is key because, until the cues indicate otherwise, all products come attached with the same answer: no. No video game has the consumer's interests at heart because there is a mismatch in incentives between the two parties. The video game maker stands to benefit from every purchase, but the consumer might not; they could dislike their gaming experience and regret their purchase. Therefore, the consumer will, by default, continue to reject every signal these products send their way. (Mercier 85—87) The difficulty in establishing trust and aligning incentives helps explain why so many games are flops no matter how good they may be.
Further stacking the deck against the Pokémon creators in this scenario is the empirical evidence showing advertisements do not work. Upon reviewing the research on advertising, Mercier concluded, "Early work on advertising efficiency suggested that most ads had no discernible effect whatsoever. Marketing researcher Gerard Tellis drew from his review of advertising effectiveness these words of caution: 'The truth, as many advertisers will quickly admit, is that persuasion is very tough. It is even more difficult to persuade consumers to adopt a new opinion, attitude, or behavior.'" (Mercier 141-143) This goes back to the cue of 'does this person have my interests at heart?' Ads are so ineffective because everything in an advert's message is skewed to the advertiser's self-interest, creating a trust gap. So any child (or more likely, their parents) will reject an advert for Pokémon games as not being in their interests.
So if direct advertising from Nintendo will by-and-large not work in selling a Pokémon game, what will work? Answer: trustworthiness and word-of-mouth marketing.
Of all the cues available to consumers, word-of-mouth is almost certainly the most reliable. The wider effects of word-of-mouth are well-known. According to a study from the McKinsey Institute, "word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20 to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions…Its influence is greatest when consumers are buying a product for the first time or when products are relatively expensive, factors that tend to make people conduct more research, seek more opinions, and deliberate longer than they otherwise would.”[emphasis added] (Bughin et al.) Word-of-mouth works because the 'advertising' comes from people whom the consumer already trusts. How well does it work? Well: “In fact, our research shows that a high-impact recommendation—from a trusted friend conveying a relevant message, for example—is up to 50 times more likely to trigger a purchase than is a low-impact recommendation.” (Bughin et al.)
In Pokémon’s case, ‘high-impact recommendations’—trading version exclusive Pokémon between game consoles—are bundled into the gameplay.
So let’s return to our two players for a minute. Player 1 wants to trade with Player 2, but Player 2 has never heard of Pokémon or isn’t sure about the game. Suddenly, their friend, not some corporate executive from Nintendo, is showing them this cool new game. Player 1 isn’t trying to sell them on playing Pokémon and has no immediate self-interest beyond getting a cool new Pokémon. Even there, it’s not a self-interested claim because they’re able to barter a version exclusive Pokémon in return. Given all this information, Player 2 can trust that Player 1 has their interests at heart and they can soon enjoy the game together.
Of course, Pokémon trades only affect two players, so the final ingredient of Pokémon’s success rely on the networks and connections between those players buying the Pokémon games. Let’s talk networks for a minute.
Networks: You're Known By The Company You Keep
Trust might be the lifeblood of Pokémon’s long-term success, but that lifeblood must flow through a healthy network for that success to actually occur. The player’s network achieves what the advertisement cannot: persuasion and conversion from rejecting information to accepting it. Therefore, players embedded within key networks of trustworthy figures can more easily satisfy sceptical non-players’ open-vigilance mechanisms. Continuing from the word-of-mouth discussion, the players’ networks matter because those connections determine who exactly is spreading the message that new players have to buy the new Pokémon game.
According to Niall Ferguson, what determines how a message will spread in a network stems from which person within the network passes the information along. "A complex cultural contagion," he writes, "unlike a simple disease epidemic, first needs to attain a critical mass of early adopters with degree of centrality (relatively large numbers of influential friends)". (Ferguson 35) A strong, recent example of a product achieving critical mass is TikTok: "Part of TikTok's popularity came from canny early adopters cherry-picking the best bits and reposting them using the built-in share function on the app onto other platforms like Facebook and Twitter, where they gained an audience often larger than the views seen on TikTok itself." [emphasis added] (Stokel-Walker 70) Enthusiastic early adopters tend to have a horizontal network structure that allows them to create virality when compared to a more top-down, hierarchical structure. (Ferguson 47) Since Pokémon trades depend on peer-to-peer player network, they’re more likely to follow that viral horizontal structure.
So not only does Pokémon’s core gameplay feature, trading, have the only effective form of marketing built into it, it also has the network structure most likely to increase the virality needed to keep and retain the most number of players no matter how many games are released.
Conclusion
Putting the elements of trust, networking, the trading system, and version exclusive Pokémon together, the reasons for the Pokémon franchise’s jaw-dropping success becomes much clearer. A single player, buying their first Pokémon title, will be met with a game featuring cute and powerful creatures whose central mechanic, the battle system, ensures they have a good, simple playing experience. However, to actually finish the game as intended, they need to go out and recruit their friends via the most effective form of marketing that exists, word-of-mouth. Some of these friends know about Pokémon, some don’t, but all trust that the player coming to them looking for help has their interests at heart. So they in turn will buy the game and tap into their network of friends in an effort to catch them all.
And trading version exclusive Pokémon between players isn’t the game’s only way of roping in new players. Another key element of playing Pokémon games, finding rare Pokémon that are harder to obtain, means some players will have more attractive Pokémon to trade than others, not to mention extremely valuable gameplay tips. So by default, especially in the pre-internet era, players spontaneously used their networks to build an audience that, to this day, eagerly awaits the franchise’s next release. And because each new release inevitably adds at least one new player, the question shouldn’t be “why is Pokémon worth $95 billion” but rather “why is Pokémon only worth $95 billion”.