Current Events > "Pokemon is the biggest IP" is kinda a sussy "fact"

(+) Yeah! (+)

A lot of it comes from this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media_franchises

I used to go by this list too until I noticed some stuff was shaking around. Mario used to be a franchise around "50 billion" according to this list, but now it's suddenly at 8 billion, and supposedly the movie already has grossed "1/4th" of the lifetime Mario revenue, despite the Mario series reportedly selling at least 800M copies lifetime (if we are to believe this list of course).

Speaking of Pokemon, if you look at this article's history, you will see at one point, they reported Pokemon at being over $100B but now suddenly it's $76B, which is a large "oopsie-drop" to making in this list. Not to mention, going back to Mario, look at the franchises above it, and tell me if you truly think many of those would have outgrossed Mario. All you have to see is Street Fighter somehow making "10B in video-game" revenue vs Mario's supposed "7.2B" to know something isn't right (considering SF's lifetime sales are on par with the Mario Sports brand).

Now, how accurate can this list be? I have to assume a lot of sales were not recorded as thoroughly for very old franchises such as Mickey and comic-book franchises in general. I wouldn't be surprised if we are missing out on a lot of sales figures pre-00's in general. This is not even asking the question of what truly constitutes a "franchise" in the first place. We have the MCU separated from Spider-Man, which is separated from comics, and probably a certain portion of merch in general. How about deciding Batman and the DC should be separated, even though there is quite a bit of interconnectivity between the two.

Shoot, people use this "fact' to incorrectly make estimates such as "Detective Pikachu will make 1B because how could the mascot of the "world's-biggest IP" not draw that much? In the end, we saw Mario has a lot more brand-power in the modern age than Pikachu ended up having.

This whole rant is just more so a "please use professional skepticism."

I encourage you all to look at the edit history of this article, and see just how dramatically it will change. I would have to question the entire validity of this list. A part of me feels like they should take this list down as it's quite clear it's only spreading misinformation and there's no good measure for this statistic.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

but like, the lack of complete information is still spreading misinformation. Objectively, many franchises are being reported as grossing significantly less than they actually would have.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has outsold the entire Street Fighter franchise. There is no credible argument to Street Fighter to have grossed more in video-game sales than the entire Mario franchise.

To tout Pokemon as the highest-grossing franchise of all time when you are missing a ton of information is incredibly misleading. Even Pokemon is missing information considering it's only listing Pokemon's mobile gaming revenue, and not including the hundreds of millions of sales from the conventional series.

Edit: To me, if the article needs work before it can accurately reflect "the truth" which I don't even think can be found since a lot of old records would have been lost, it shouldn't be up. It's objectively spreading misinformation, and even though we were told Wikipedia can't be 100% trusted, Wikipedia itself would argue that if there is incorrect information, they will not continue to present that.