- Published on
It's All About the Merch
- Authors
- Name
- edstef
- @epmeddie
Introduction
Is the whole point of creating an entertainment brand to eventually sell merch? It seems like the medium doesn’t matter—video games, movies, TV shows, music—once they reach a certain size, all roads seem to lead to selling t-shirts and plushies.
It makes sense too, entertainment in general has a weird scalability issue where the product is only purchased or consumed a single time. You buy an album once, watch a movie or tv show once, buy a video game once, and after that if you want to make more money, you need to create more content. This content is usually very expensive to make - movies, video games - coming out with a sequel or add-ons costs millions, and could even turn fans off of a franchise if it’s not up to par.
But what if there was another way, something that was super inexpensive to create and could be sold over and over and over again. The markup on t-shirts or plushies is sometimes upwards of 10x. You don’t need to think of anything new either, just slap the already beloved characters on a t-shirt, lunchbox, action figure and let the money roll in.
Perhaps we can think of the multi-million dollar budgets that some video-games have simply as an investment to draw people towards characters so they will buy inexpensive-to-make merch.
Pokemon and Demon Slayer
This blog post was originally inspired from this Games Beat article announcing how hershey kisses will now be selling original Pokemon chocolates. Between this, the TV shows, and the trading cards it’s easy to forget that Pokemon emanated from a simple hand held game.
In 2023, Pokemon made $10.8 Billion from its merch sales with lifetime sales surpassing $100 Billion today. All this while the video games have only brought in around $30 Billion. That means if you look strictly at the numbers, Pokemon is a merchandise retailer more than it is a video game company. Beloved Nintendo franchises like Zelda, Mario, and countless others all follow suit with their merchandise revenue out-earning their video games.
Curiosity got the best of me so I also looked into popular TV shows and found that anime specifically was also all about the merch. Around 90% of Demon Slayer revenue came from merchandise sales! Of the $9 Billion Demon Slayer has brought in (as of 2020), a mere $0.9 Billion of that is not from merch 🤯.
Conclusion
It’s crazy to think that someone out there is designing a character and thinking: “Yeah, this will make a great plushie.” Luckily for people who consume the content, it works in our favour. The better the character and franchise, the more likely we will be to buy merch. And so, if video game companies want to get rich selling us merch they had better make a good video game first.