Pokémon has enjoyed a lofty, unassailable status as the highest-grossing media franchise in pop culture, with its mighty $113.7 billion in revenue outpacing the MCU and even Star Wars. It’s an astonishing achievement for the relatively much younger franchise, but Pokémon is not the same wholesome icon fans may recall. In fact, it’s lost ground in some key areas.

While competitors have come and gone in the creature-collecting business, Pokémon’s most iconic rival is certainly Digimon, despite its digital pet origins. Each franchise tore into the world of ’90s pop culture, with anime adaptations, video games, and collectible card games. While Pokémon is in no danger of losing its dominance, Digimon has developed a more stable public image.

Pokémon Fans Have Lost Patience for Its Mainline Offerings

Beyond the unmitigated disaster that was Pokemon Scarlet & Violet, the franchise has come under fire ever since its transition to the Nintendo Switch for several concerning issues. The games have since featured more strictly limited National Pokedexes, horrendous performance issues, and a general loss of trust from longtime fans. Some even seek their Pokémon showdowns elsewhere, without naming names.

Despite losing player goodwill, as a mainstay brand and Nintendo’s biggest franchise, Pokémon still stands to win big with October 16, 2025’s release of Pokémon Legends: Z-A. For millennials who grew up playing Pokémon, it remains a nostalgic favorite, and new generations still accept the game uncritically despite Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl or Sword & Shield’s disappointments.

However, Pokémon has become a different beast since its humble Game Boy origins. It’s had a wildly popular trading card game, but is undermined by speculations of market corrections and a recurring Pokémon card scalping problem. It’s even got a highly popular anime. But in asserting its identity, Pokémon has picked some wildly unpopular battles.

Palworld Brings Out the Worst in Pokemon

It was a bold move to market a creature-collecting survival sim with guns, but Pocketpair won the indie lottery with Palworld. The game isn’t even out of its early access, but The Pokémon Company has remained keenly aware, making some wildly controversial legal moves that could be the precursor to an anti-competitive era for Pokémon.

This hasn’t forced Pocketpair out of the race, though. The company has met Pokémon’s patent action and September 2024 lawsuit with various actions, including even making detrimental updates to help distance themselves from copyright infringement, a typical legal strategy in such suits. But it’s a bad look for Pokémon.

Pokémon doesn’t stand to gain much if Palworld meets their demands, relatively speaking, but the legal actions taken to protect their brand are prohibitive and raise industry-wide questions.

Pocketpair has even contested this by raising the examples of Tomb Raider, ARK: Survival Evolved, Final Fantasy 14, and more games that would be affected by Pokémon’s numerous patents including but not limited to, summoning characters for battle. But one creature collecting game, despite being nearly as old as Pokémon, has consistently avoided controversy in its niche, and that’s Digimon.

Digimon Is Winning a Different Battle

In terms of pro-consumer availability, Digimon stays miles ahead of Pokémon with its new release, Digimon Story: Time Stranger, thanks to the vast combined install base of the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC market. But beyond just availability, Digimon’s new game shows impressive staying power, peaking at 84,468 players recently according to SteamDB.

Beyond a stable multiplatform player base, Digimon has also crucially stayed in its lane, with recent offerings mixing in a Shin Megami Tensei feel with the rest of its gameplay. It’s noticeably more mature, catering to the aging audience that coincidentally still buys Pokémon, but also features stable, compelling gameplay that can’t reasonably be compared to Pokémon.

Digimon will likely never see the sales heights of Pokémon’s insurmountable revenue, but it also hasn’t seen its own, as Time Stranger and earlier best-sellers like Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth show. Digimon’s game offerings are inoffensively marketed, often without trashy production values while coasting on the brand. To the discerning buyer seeking a story, Digimon is always the better choice.

Pokemon’s Anime Will Never Surpass Digimon

Custom Image by Diana Acuña

With anime becoming increasingly mainstream in the pop culture zeitgeist, both the Pokémon and Digimon franchises have taken various stabs at anime adaptations. It’s part of a rich tradition of the video-game-to-anime pipeline, with Pokémon’s dominance as the creature-collecting anime constantly embattled. But Digimon stands tall above the rest.

It’s not even as if all Digimon anime are better than Pokémon anime, but rather, that most Digimon anime feature a clear plot and strong storytelling, with some being genre-defining proto-isekai masterpieces. Digimon Tamers, with the help of head writer Chiaki J. Konaka of Serial Experiments Lain fame, is an astounding achievement Pokémon will never attain on TV.

Part of Digimon’s winning appeal with Tamers in particular is its combined ability to appeal to the kids to which it markets, while aging well for older audiences craving Digimon at its best. With an undeniably dark, mature existentialist dive into the relationship a creator can have with their creations, Digimon Tamers holds up incredibly well.

But beyond weighing nostalgic favorites against one another, Toei Animation’s Digimon Beatbreak threatens to pull viewers away from its rival’s current series, Pokémon Horizons. While it’s too early to tell whether Beatbreak will stand the test of time, fans aware of both series typically know their respective track records, trusting Digimon to tell a story that actually goes somewhere.

Digimon’s True Success Is Likely Only Beginning

Even with a dedicated fandom across Digimon’s anime, gaming, digital pets, and collectibles markets, it’s still a relatively niche product. This is despite even Toei Animation, Digimon’s anime home, boasting of the franchise’s boosts across its vital licensing revenue sources thanks to merchandising and the new anime’s launch in 2025.

While even Digimon has courted mild controversy over simple issues like a name change, it’s a stable product thanks to wins like Digimon Story: Time Stranger’s critical and commercial success. It continues to stand among Dragon Ball and One Piece as Toei’s brightest stars. It knows its market, and its reward is continuous success.

Instead of lengthy legal battles, Digimon has cultivated a reputation of having similarly excellent monster designs without dragging competitors for similar ideas. It even has had many subpar games, but has improved, rather than Pokémon’s pattern of stagnation. In the eyes of the fans, Digimon is winning its war with Pokémon without even fighting.

Created by

Akiyoshi Hongo, Kenji Watanabe

First Film

Digimon Adventure