Expensive Pokemon Games Could Finally Begin Plummeting in Price

February 20, 2026, 2:41pm

Classic games in the Pokemon series could finally start to fall in price at resale if a new move from Nintendo is any indication. Perhaps more than any other gaming franchise, Pokemon titles continue to hold their value years, or even decades, after launch. For anyone who has looked to buy Pokemon games from Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, or even Nintendo GameCube, they’ve likely seen prices that range from $50 to well over $300, depending on the entry. Fortunately, these absurd values could begin to finally fall in the months or years to come if we’re lucky.

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As of today, Nintendo confirmed that it will soon be porting Pokemon FireRed and Pokemon LeafGreen to Switch and Switch 2 platforms next week on February 27th. This represents the first mainline Pokemon games to be brought to Switch hardware since the introduction of the platform in 2017. Not only does it finally make these games more accessible than they have been in years, but it also might have a direct correlation on the resale market.

While not a guarantee, it’s likely that physical copies of Pokemon FireRed and Pokemon LeafGreen on GBA should be impacted by this launch. Currently, FireRed and LeafGreen happen to sell for about $140 on average just for the cartridge. Complete versions of both games then sell for somewhere between $300 and $400. While these complete iterations will surely continue to be expensive, loose copies are likely to see their costs fall by a decent amount. With FireRed and LeafGreen being more easily available on Switch, this will lower demand for the original games. As a result, this could be the best time ever to get these physical GBA titles if you’re still hunting them down.

Could More Pokemon Games Be Re-Released Soon?

Assuming that this isn’t a one-off situation, Nintendo could look to port additional Pokemon games to Nintendo Switch platforms moving forward. Currently, games like Pokemon Emerald, Pokemon HeartGold/SoulSilver, Pokemon Black/White, and a handful of others remain gridlocked to the platforms that they debuted on. As a result, they sell for some of the aforementioned outrageous prices that have been the standard for years. For Nintendo to bring some of these games to Switch wouldn’t only allow the company to rake in millions of dollars in new sales, but it could finally burst this resale bubble.

Then again, The Pokemon Company could simply be looking to port Pokemon FireRed and Pokemon LeafGreen to Nintendo Switch as a way of celebrating the 30th anniversary of the series. While they’re not the original games in the franchise, they are remakes of the first installments, which means that Nintendo and The Pokemon Company might be looking to honor the roots of the series and nothing more. Hopefully, this won’t be the case though, and we’ll only get more ports like this as time goes on.

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