Pokemon TCG Live’s First Year of Stats Released, Less Than 3% Usage Compared to Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel

By: Water Pokémon Master · Posted Posted onJun 20, 2024 at 12:39 PM · 64 Comments

Pokemon TCG Live officially launched worldwide on June 8th, 2023.

To celebrate its one year anniversary, TPCi has released a “Summer Bash” video that reveals a few stats about the app’s first year:

  • 60 million games were played
  • 61 billion damage was dealt
  • 141 million cards were sent to the Lost Zone
  • 2.8 million Bidoof were Knocked Out

They did not reveal how many times the app was downloaded.

For comparison, I looked up the stats for the first anniversary of Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel. Konami reported their app saw 2.1 billion games played and more than 50 million downloads by December 2022.

This means Live saw less than 3% of the battles that Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel saw in its first year. This isn’t too surprising, as Pokemon has always been marketed at a younger audience that generally doesn’t play the game.

Regardless, the Pokemon TCG still outsells Yu-Gi-Oh by a wide margin.

Later this year Pokemon will be releasing Pokemon TCG Pocket, a “lighter” version of the Pokemon TCG that should become far more popular than Live.

I will discuss this news story and further insight on tomorrow’s episode of the PokeBeach podcast.

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i honestly think one of the main issues with PTCGL that doesn't get talked about enough is how front-heavy the content is. in other words, once you complete the season's battle pass, what left is there to do besides wait for the next one?

the daily rewards are good when you're filling out the battle pass and getting big rewards, but once you complete it, what other aspects of the game are you consistently coming back to? in PTCGO, you had trading, different battle modes, a socialization feature, and more.

that's why for me, and for a lot of people, there's a significant dropoff in play time on PTCGL after the first week or two of a new format. while this is an inevitable cycle, it's made a lot worse by the lack of substance provided by this game
 
one great thing about PTCGO was that it had a theme deck battle format. this made getting into the card game EXTREMELY easy. in fact, it's how i got back into playing the card game, as the decks were easy to operate and highly accessible.

we still get theme decks to this day, in the form of ex battle decks. these would make for a fantastic beginner-friendly metagame, that would bring new faces to the game much more efficiently. in PTCGL, you'e forced to jump into the fire, and it becomes much more difficult for newcomers to work their way up into playing competitively.
 
Yknow, I’m not going to fully defend PTCGO, it had its flaws, but I mean… The fact that PTCGL was worse in just about every conceivable measure while taking away features from a 13 year old TCG client really makes this unsurprising.

I don’t know who out there thought that PTCGL’s visual… Style? Was a good idea, but with my limited experience on TCGL after spending many, MANY hours trading and battling- Especially with the Legacy Format- In PTCGO, I was just… Disappointed.

They could’ve either just kept PTCGO or actually put in the effort to make your MAIN TCG CLIENT actually work and be appealing to the playerbase.

And yes, I’m still salty about Legacy being axed after all these years. Its introduction was the best thing that ever happened on PTCGO.
 
Called it from the start. And no, just fixing glitches wouldn't grow the base 30x. This is why we'll never get a proper app.
 
koala cub said:
one great thing about PTCGO was that it had a theme deck battle format. this made getting into the card game EXTREMELY easy. in fact, it's how i got back into playing the card game, as the decks were easy to operate and highly accessible.

we still get theme decks to this day, in the form of ex battle decks. these would make for a fantastic beginner-friendly metagame, that would bring new faces to the game much more efficiently. in PTCGL, you'e forced to jump into the fire, and it becomes much more difficult for newcomers to work their way up into playing competitively.
Click to expand...
I actually disagree, unless you wanted to buy a ton of code cards actually moving beyond theme decks was a nightmare (80 packs to trade for an Arceus Vstar anyone?), meanwhile live just gives you most of the best decks in format.

What live sucks at most Imo is the reward structure, it takes like 10-15 games to get a rank on the battle pass once you've done your dailies, which really disincentivizes you to play until those have refreshed. It doesn't help that once you've built your deck there's not much on the battle pass for you besides gems which are best used to get farther in the battle pass since everything in the store costs like 3x more than it should.

The game needs an overhaul to the music and visual design, the music is way too repetitive, and no one likes how the characters look which makes cosmetic rewards less exciting, I hope if they redo the visuals they call up James Turner or someone who knows how to design Pokemon characters. Most of all, the game is slow, the PC version should not have a drag based interface, I should click a card to use it or then click the target to attach to, moreover animations should not need to finish to begin a new action. I get that dragging cards might be better for mobile but just have options. Also controller support would be appreciated.

Finally the game needs to launch on Steam after some improvements, there's a lot of people who won't download games outside of there anymore on pc.
 
>141 million cards were sent to the Lost Zone
This is an interesting stat. If we assume most lost zone player probably average to about 10 sent per game, this would imply 14m games were played by lost zone players. Not knowing how many of those were mirror matches, somewhere between 10-20% of the playerbase is LZ.
 
There's not really much to do on Live. You can play Standard. And you can play an unfinished version of expanded. That's it. Pretty lame

No Legacy, no GLC, no theme deck or equivalent format, no previous Worlds or Block formats. There's an official Alternative Play handbook detailing a variety of different formats and game rules from TPCi themselves, but none of it is integrated into Live. You can't create any sort of public tournaments of any kind, either with your own custom rules or an officially supported format. Even PTCGO was only decent variety-wise (IMO), yet Live is a massive step back in this regard.

I know most people's issues with Live relate to its bugs, glitches and visuals, but this is just the greatest reason why the game has been a letdown for me personally.
 
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koala cub said:
i honestly think one of the main issues with PTCGL that doesn't get talked about enough is how front-heavy the content is. in other words, once you complete the season's battle pass, what left is there to do besides wait for the next one?

the daily rewards are good when you're filling out the battle pass and getting big rewards, but once you complete it, what other aspects of the game are you consistently coming back to? in PTCGO, you had trading, different battle modes, a socialization feature, and more.

that's why for me, and for a lot of people, there's a significant dropoff in play time on PTCGL after the first week or two of a new format. while this is an inevitable cycle, it's made a lot worse by the lack of substance provided by this game
Click to expand...
This is a major issue with multiple of the mobile Pokemon games. You've already mentioned Live, but it's also an issue with Unite and Go.

In unite, really the only thing to work towards is the battlepass. Some folks do ranked, but you get basically nothing for it besides the same retextured outfits and currency. Unite doesn't give players enough free coins to warrant actually playing, even if you have the battle pass completed.

As for GO, the entire game is structured around going outside, which poses two issues; If you can't go out even every 3-5 days, there is NOTHING to do. You can't do raids, there's no global trading (??), there's nothing extra to do like poffin making, amie, curry making, etc, and you can't catch more than a few mons a day. But then, if you can walk and/or drive places, once you get home...that's it. There's nothing to do.

Whether or not some of you like or even play these games, I think we can all agree it's sad to see things with so much potential go to waste. These games deserve to give more to us and we should BE ABLE TO WANT TO give more to them...
 
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