Pokémon UNITE: 20 years to match 97 days of TCG Pocket

The Pokémon Company has announced the end of Pokémon UNITE, with revenue, download and social media figures showing a game that started small within the franchise and is shutting down with Brazil among its biggest markets.

Although UNITE drew its largest World Championships audience in 2026, its revenue and downloads lag behind other major hits such as Pokémon GO (in Portuguese) and Pokémon TCG Pocket.

In figures compiled through February 2025, UNITE ranked fifth in revenue among the six Pokémon games analyzed by Jogometria, behind GO, TCG Pocket, Sleep and Masters EX, and ahead of only Café ReMix.

Early in the MOBA's life, estimated player spending on UNITE had already fallen from US$39.6 million in its first full year to US$24.6 million in its second, a 37.9% decline. App market data indicates that revenue had settled at around US$25 million a year.

UNITE remained one of Pokémon's smaller mobile games

Over the same 12-month period, UNITE generated about 3.5% of Pokémon GO's revenue. Pokémon TCG Pocket, meanwhile, surpassed US$500 million in its first 97 days. At US$25 million a year, UNITE would need 20 years to reach that amount.

In April 2026, even as its revenue declined, the card game still made US$31.4 million in a single month, more than UNITE earned in a year.

The problem was not just its trajectory. UNITE started small by the franchise's standards. Comparing each game's first year from its own launch shows that the MOBA had the lowest first-year revenue of the five games compared.

Cumulative revenue since the mobile launch reached US$99.9 million by February 2025, less than Pokémon GO makes in two months at the annual rate used in this comparison.

For Tencent, that figure is a rounding error. The group's games business generated 241.6 billion yuan in 2025, roughly US$33 billion, with more than US$10 billion coming from outside China.

Honor of Kings alone, TiMi's own MOBA, made US$1.69 billion on app stores in 2025, roughly 43 times UNITE's best year.

TiMi, which also makes Call of Duty: Mobile and Arena of Valor, was already reported to be the world's highest-grossing studio in 2020, with US$10 billion that year. At that scale, UNITE's roughly US$25 million a year represents less than 0.1% of the group's gaming revenue.

There was no shortage of updates

The decline cannot be explained by a lack of content: the game, developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group and published by The Pokémon Company, kept adding new Pokémon at a steady pace until the end.

The roster grew from 20 Pokémon at its original launch to 102 in October 2026, counting Mega Evolutions as separate entries, as the game itself does.

The fifth year of operation brought the most additions, with 21 Pokémon. In 2026 alone, 18 had arrived by October 13, two weeks before the shutdown announcement. Updates accelerated just as revenue was at its lowest level.

Brazil is one of the countries most affected

Brazil is one of UNITE's biggest markets for estimated mobile downloads. In the AppMagic figures published on the day of the announcement, Brazil accounts for 14% of the game's 127 million app-store downloads, tied with India and ahead of the United States at 10%. Japan, the franchise's birthplace, has 5%.

Revenue reverses that order. In the same figures, Japan generated 29% of the game's revenue with one-twentieth of its downloads. In the earlier July 2024 figures, the United States led revenue at 29%, followed by Japan at 25% and South Korea at 7%. Brazil does not appear among the biggest paying markets in either snapshot.

In the 2026 figures, each Japanese download generated roughly six times the global average revenue per download.

That pattern dates back to launch. During the mobile launch week in September 2021, Brazil ranked third in downloads, behind India and the United States, according to Appfigures, while revenue in the first few days came almost entirely from the United States and Japan.

In 2024, Brazil and India already shared the lead in installs, at 12% each. Brazil's share of downloads grew by two percentage points in two years; its revenue share, even if it grew, did not reach the top three.

A game that never got people talking online

UNITE was not a game that drove social media engagement. Over the period analyzed, it accounted for 0.23% of the conversation about Pokémon on networks monitored by Brandwatch, across all languages and countries. Just over two in every thousand mentions of the franchise referred to the MOBA.

A comparison with other games under the same search conditions shows the relative scale of the conversation from September 2025 to October 2026.

Pokémon GO generates 23 times as much conversation. The more uncomfortable comparison is with Masters EX, a 2019 game described by the specialist press as being in decline: it generates 85% of UNITE's conversation volume, despite having no World Championships presence. In conversation and revenue, UNITE occupied the same tier as an aging title nearing the end of its cycle.

What is next for Pokémon UNITE before March?

The shutdown calendar has three dates for players and two for competitors:

The Aeos Crown is the game's final official competition, with US$1 million in prizes across qualifiers and finals. It ends on March 21, before the servers close at 9 p.m. on March 22 in Brasília (midnight UTC on March 23). Brazil has three places in the Tokyo finals (in Portuguese), to be decided in December's qualifier.

After March 22, the Library will remain: a version of the app displaying Pokémon, items, achievements and tournament records, without matches or support. Anyone who does not download it before the deadline will lose that too.