I was seven when I bought my first Pokemon game. I pulled weeds for my neighbors all summer to save up $80 for a lime green Game Boy Color (roughly $153 today), and my dad covered the thirty bucks for Pokemon Yellow. It was the center of an obsession that had started a few years earlier, sitting amongst a small collection of cards, a Pikachu plush, and five Indigo League VHS tapes. Tragically, if I were a kid just getting into Pokemon today, entry into the massive franchise wouldn’t be as easy as yanking dandelions for a few hours. In fact, I’d likely never have had a chance to jump into the series at all.
Videos by ComicBook.com
In 2025, entry into the Pokemon franchise has become overwhelmingly expensive. The increasing cost of the cards bars young players from jumping into the TCG, video game prices can’t possibly be covered with allowance, and access to TV episodes is typically locked behind subscription services that children can’t pay for. Add to that the extreme saturation of stuff that has become a part of being a Pokemon fan, and young trainers will need a full-time job just to participate.
So what happened, exactly? How did a series geared at children five through thirteen become entrenched in designer handbag crossovers, $400 plushes, and gaming consoles so expensive that most adults struggle to afford them? Unfortunately, a combination of factors over the past 15 years has put us where we are now, and raises a simple question: Is Pokemon still for kids?
Gotta Buy It All
I am the parent of a four-year-old boy who dreams of being Ash Ketchum. However, instead of playing “Pokemon Battle” with a Pikachu and Squirtle plush like I did at his age, he plays them out with hand-crocheted cats. When I was little, my first Pikachu plush came from a Walmart in Mountain Home, Idaho. It cost about four dollars.
Today, a similar Pikachu plush would cost between $16 and $55. Even the ten bucks from his birthday card couldn’t cover one. Unfortunately, I can’t just drop that kind of money when he outgrows his shoes every two months.
That brings us to an important part of the modern Pokemon agenda: buy everything. While it used to be pretty cool to get a plush or a shirt when I was younger, the modern Pokemon fan needs to be smothered in stuff. You have to have the backpack, the dishware, the swimsuits, the gym gear, and the sculpted figures. Plushes, jewelry, pins, journals, Funko Pops, rugs – it’s never-ending. And this is just the officially licensed product on the Pokemon Center Website.
Pokemon influencers are seen online, showing off whole rooms filled to the brim with junk, wearing expensive “crossover” clothing lines from designer Crocs to multi-hundred-dollar purses. You want that PUMA x Pokemon pair of sneakers? Sixty bucks. Pokemon x Skinnydip Phone Case? A cool $42. This doesn’t even count designer baby clothes collections like the 2024 Monpoke collection, which listed children’s denim jackets for eye-watering prices.
Being a Pokemon trainer went from collecting cards from two-dollar packs at the drug store to a full-on lifestyle brand propped up by premium crossovers at prices beyond what most adult fans can afford, let alone a seven-year-old.
Sure, you can buy a set of Pikachu pajamas at Walmart for ten bucks, but I challenge any parent out there to see those go more than ten washes. Pokemon has made it clear with its box retail products, if you don’t go premium, you don’t get the quality.
For most kids, the cost is just too great. A standard booster pack of TCG cards costs $5, and that might be the cheapest thing on the market. A Nintendo Switch 2 is going to be $450, and new Pokemon games are set to be $80. From a price standpoint, children have been completely pushed out of a franchise built on ten-year-olds going on magical creature-collecting adventures. If they do manage to get the gear needed to play, they will constantly be battling consumerism FOMO as they try to “be cool” around the other kids who also managed to meet the entry fee to play the games.
Related: Pokemon TCG to Release Must-Have Team Rocket Merch
As a parent, it breaks my heart knowing that my son is financially prohibited from accessing a world that I watched on cable TV for free growing up. One he has seen me stay in love with, and that he also wants to be a part of. We just can’t afford to buy it all, and frankly, we shouldn’t have to.
Pokémon Isn’t Marketed to Children
Despite a story built on the magical adventures of literal children, Pokemon hasn’t been for kids in over a decade. The Pokemon World relies on something called “nostalgic passdown”. This is a marketing strategy used by many large companies like Marvel, Disney, Star Wars, and many more. Basically, the franchise keeps parents entrenched and relies on those parents bringing new customers in by way of sharing the world with their children. We have seen plenty of examples of this, with the biggest currently existing in the Disney remake spiral we’ve been trapped in for years.
Essentially, Pokemon doesn’t need to market to kids because they assume parents who are already fans of the series will organically introduce it to their children. However, to ensure that this happens, the company has to keep adult fans deeply entrenched in the franchise. This has caused something of a split in marketing intentions. A five-year-old doesn’t care if his Pikachu sneakers are from PUMA, but a thirty-year-old parent is going to feel like a hero getting those sneakers for the whole family so they can match and each be wearing their favorite starters.
That newborn baby doesn’t care if their onesie has a Pikachu on it, but it allows a new parent to embrace their nerdiness while coping with being a sleep-deprived disaster with minimal personal identity. (This was me. I was this parent.)
In fact, so many adults have built their identities around the franchises that meant something to them as children, that it seems only natural to want to adorn their lives, and children, with the stuff that reminds them of those things. But now it needs to be more grown-up, so Gucci and Tiffany crossovers mean you like Pokemon but you are classy. You’re not the average nerd. You’re a cute, grown-up nerd who can afford to rock an $150 Team Rocket HQ bomber jacket.
But in order to do this, Pokemon can’t keep focused on the actual audience that built the franchise, and oftentimes, kids are brought into the series via all the stuff, not the actual experience. Modern Pokemon kiddos aren’t bringing their decks to school without sleeves to play against their buddies. They keep every card in a binder and boast about how much each one is worth. Why wouldn’t they, with how much each pack costs? They aren’t watching the newest episode of Ash on Cartoon Network each week. They wait months for a season to drop on Netflix and then binge it in one sitting. They aren’t playing the video games to collect cute friends and then tackle the Elite Four, they are trying to Shiny Hunt like the Streamers on Twitch and TikTok.
In short, children of today aren’t creating nostalgic experiences with the Pokemon franchise, they are consuming products fed to them by the nostalgic fans who are raising them. This is why toys are so expensive, and why it seems like the games are less and less for kids, right down to the price tags. Kids don’t need to buy it if their parents plan to anyway.
Why Does It Matter?
At the end of the day, we, as Pokemon fans, should be fighting to preserve the experience of the franchise for the next generation. It was never about the stuff. It was never about spending a ton of money to look like a good fan. It was about becoming a Pokemon Trainer and going on an amazing adventure and accomplishing things you never thought possible.
I had a lot of struggles as a kid. I had undiagnosed ADHD, grew up very poor, and struggled with reading until I was at an embarrassing age. My journey through that copy of Pokemon Yellow I bought with my yard money at seven years old was the first time I’d ever felt like I could do something amazing. I didn’t need fancy clothes. I didn’t need a down payment for a console. I just needed my Pikachu and the open expanse of the Kanto region.
I’ll never forget the amazing connections I made with classmates, friends who I ended up keeping for a lifetime, that started by pretending to throw Poke Balls on a playground at ten years old to enact imaginary battles until the bell rang.
I want my son to have all of that.
So when he is seven years old, I’m going to put that old, Green, Game Boy Color in his hand, we are going to boot up Yellow, and I hope above all else that he has an adventure that makes him feel like he can do anything. I hope that he is able to forge his own connection with the story and create memories that belong to him. Not what I projected onto him.
That chance to dream and be a kid should never be out of reach, especially because of a price tag, and I want him to know that he can be just as amazing as Pokemon taught me I could be.
Most Viewed
-
Bob looking angry in Thunderbolts*
