A market that stopped behaving like a hobby
Pokémon cards are no longer just a nostalgia purchase. In January 2026, analysts called it a watershed moment for the Pokémon trading card game market, with the average price of a Pokémon card rising 46 percent year on year. Weeks later, a PSA 10 graded Pikachu Illustrator, a 1997 to 1998 Japanese promo originally given to illustration contest winners, sold for $16mil USD at Goldin Auctions. Guinness World Records now recognises it as the most expensive trading card ever sold.
At the same time, a separate but related market posted its own record. The global retro gaming console market jumped 21.8 percent to $3.8 billion USD in 2025, the biggest single-year increase the sector has ever recorded. Two categories that used to sit firmly in the hobby column, Pokémon cards and vintage game consoles, are now generating the kind of numbers usually associated with alternative asset classes. For collectors, insurers, SMSF trustees and estate planners, that shift changes what these items need to be treated as.
The market, by the numbers
The broader trading card game industry has been on a steady climb. The global TCG market was valued at approximately $8.4 billion USD in 2025 and is forecast to reach $9.2 billion USD in 2026, according to industry market research. Pokémon remains the single biggest driver of that growth. By March 2026, the Pokémon TCG had become a $2.7 billion USD annual ecosystem on its own.
Global card volume backs up the price data. In the fiscal year ending March 2024, worldwide Pokémon card sales reached a record 11.9 billion cards, a 22.7 percent increase year on year. Retail tracking firm Circana credited Pokémon as the main driver behind the TCG category, which grew 39 percent in the first half of 2025 alone. By player count and unit volume, Pokémon is now the number one trading card game in both the United States and worldwide, ahead of long-standing rivals such as Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh!.
The 30th anniversary effect
Much of the current momentum is tied to a single calendar event: Pokémon's 30th anniversary in 2026. The Pokémon Company has leaned into it with strategic product releases timed to the milestone, and legacy partners have followed suit, including McDonald's bringing back Pokémon TCG promos in its Happy Meals, a callback to a promotion that caused its own frenzy decades earlier. Analysts describe sentiment heading into 2026 as broadly bullish, driven by a mix of anniversary hype, renewed interest in classic mechanics like Mega Evolutions, and ongoing nostalgia around sets like Pokémon 151.
Retro gaming's parallel boom
Vintage consoles and cartridges are riding a similar wave, for similar reasons. The retro gaming console market, valued at $3.8 billion USD in 2025, is projected to reach $4.18 billion USD in 2026, with a compound annual growth rate of roughly 10 percent, well ahead of the broader console market's 3 to 5 percent growth. On current trajectories, the market is expected to expand to $8.5 billion USD by 2033.
The people driving this are not children rediscovering old toys. Approximately 14 percent of the total gaming population now actively engage in retro gaming, and the profile skews toward people in their 30s, 40s and 50s who have disposable income and specific memories of playing on a CRT television. That demographic is showing up in the pricing: sealed consoles are hitting record prices with, according to a 2026 Athlon Sports report, no visible slowdown in high-grade lots.
A grading system straining under its own success
Perhaps the clearest signal of how fast this market is moving is what's happening inside the grading companies themselves. A total of 26.8 million cards were graded across major grading services in 2025, a 32 percent jump from 2024's already substantial 20 million. PSA accounted for the majority, grading 19.26 million cards, a 71.8 percent market share, with CGC in a distant second at 4.92 million cards, or 18.4 percent.
To put the growth in context, PSA was grading approximately 15,000 cards per day globally in 2021. Today that figure sits at roughly 90,000 cards per day. The company has responded by committing an additional 200 million US dollars over the next 18 months to expand capacity and modernise operations, including plans to add more than 1,000 employees. When a grading company needs a nine-figure infrastructure investment just to keep pace with submissions, that is a reasonable proxy for how much capital is now flowing through this market.
Similarly, TCG Grading, part of Australia’s largest grading operations has seen explosive growth over the last 18 months, with submissions jumping up by as much s 350 percent month on month across all TCG and card categories, although Pokémon is still the dominant category, accounting for 73 percent of total submissions in 2025.
Why supply keeps losing to demand
None of this growth has solved the industry's most persistent problem: not enough product to go around. The Pokémon Company printed an estimated 10 billion cards between March 2025 and March 2026, and shortages have continued regardless. New expansions routinely sell out within minutes of release, collectors have queued in car parks for restocks, and bots continue to strip online retailers of stock before genuine buyers can check out. One widely reported example saw GameStop marking up 30th anniversary product by more than 300 percent, illustrating how scarcity is being monetised at multiple points in the supply chain, not just by outside scalpers.
The Pokémon Company and Nintendo have both acknowledged the issue publicly and introduced countermeasures, including stricter identity verification at point of sale, more frequent reprinting of high-demand sets, closer cooperation with online marketplaces to identify bot activity, and in some markets, government-ID-linked lottery systems for high-demand releases, an approach already used in Japan. Whether these measures catch up with demand before the anniversary cycle cools is, at this stage, an open question.
The view from Australia
Australian collectors are seeing the same dynamics play out locally. Local conventions, tournaments and trading communities continue to underpin demand, and industry commentary describes both the Australian and New Zealand markets as being in the middle of their own version of the anniversary-driven surge.
What this means if you're holding the asset, not just collecting it
A market appreciating this quickly, with this much volatility built into it, is exactly the environment where an informal sense of value stops being good enough. A collection assessed a year ago, based on eBay sold listings or a quick look at a pricing app, may bear little resemblance to what it is genuinely worth today, and that gap works in both directions. Underinsurance, inaccurate SMSF or estate reporting, and disputes over replacement value at claim time all trace back to the same root cause: a valuation that hasn't kept pace with a market moving at 46 percent year on year.
For collectors treating Pokémon cards, sealed product or retro consoles as more than a hobby, whether for insurance, superannuation compliance, lending, or estate planning, the practical takeaway from this data is straightforward. The market has changed fast enough that any valuation older than a year should be treated with caution, and any valuation that hasn't involved physical inspection and verified comparable sales data should be treated as an estimate, not a number to rely on.
TCG VALUATIONS
TCG Valuations provides independent, PI-backed, AVAA-aligned valuations for Pokémon cards, retro consoles and pop culture collectibles across Australia. Whether you need a fast Market Opinion or a formal, insurance-grade valuation report, our evidence-based methodology gives collectors, SMSF trustees, insurers and legal professionals a number they can rely on, backed by physical inspection, verified provenance and current comparable sales data. Get in touch to have your collection properly assessed.
Sources:
GM Insights, Trading Card Games Market Size & Share 2026-2035; Shopify/Substack, "Some Pokémon cards are outperforming the S&P 500"; Circana retail tracking data, H1 2025; Icon Era, Retro Gaming Console Sales Statistics 2026; Nerdbeak, "Retro Gaming Just Crossed $4 Billion" (2026); Sports Collectors Daily, PSA $200 Million Infrastructure Investment report; SI Collectibles, "Over 26 Million Cards Graded in 2025"; Kotaku, "10 Billion Pokémon Cards Got Printed And It Still Wasn't Enough"; Engadget, GameStop Pokémon 30th anniversary markup report; IBTimes Australia, Pokémon Card Market 2026 record sales report; Big Boi Sneakers, Pokémon TCG Investment Guide Australia & New Zealand 2026