How many Pokémon video games have been sold?

How to get close to this number

Multiply generations by sales per generation. Generation after generation, each with a paired release selling tens of millions, plus remakes and spin-offs, accumulates to several hundred million. Franchise totals are always the integral of a long release schedule rather than any single hit, and a series that has released new games for three decades has had a very long time to add up.

Comparing it to this site's Minecraft question is instructive: one title in the hundreds of millions versus a franchise at five hundred and fifteen million across dozens of releases. A single unsplit product can come surprisingly close to an entire franchise, because franchise totals divide their audience across instalments while a single evergreen title accumulates the same buyers repeatedly.

The wider claim in the explanation is the one worth knowing: the franchise as a whole — cards, anime, merchandise, films — is generally reckoned the highest-grossing media property of all time, ahead of the film franchises people would name first. Games are the smallest part of its revenue, and merchandising is the largest. The game figure itself counts shipments of all Pokémon software, spin-offs included, not just the main series.