In fact, if you want to say that you like it, Zhou Fangyuan likes not only the Gundam series, but also the Pokémon series and the Dragon Ball series, all of which used to be his favorites.

Especially Pokémon, if you want to say that the status in Zhou Fangyuan's heart, Pokémon is undoubtedly higher than Gundam.

The first time he watched Pokémon anime, it was a disc he watched at his classmate's house, and it wasn't on TV at the time. Later, when he was in the sixth grade of elementary school, Beitong TV began to broadcast Pokémon, and it was also a class with a station, I believe that young people who have come from that era should have memories.

Especially the theme song of the first version of the unprinted version, Zhou Fangyuan can't forget it for many years, and it is definitely the biggest anime divine comedy in his heart.

Therefore, the fact that the copyright of the Gundam series cannot be purchased is not worth Zhou Fangyuan's anger, he is angry, and he is angry that Wan Dai is not long-sighted.

But how to say it, although he was angry, he didn't take this matter to heart, because naturally someone would deal with this matter for him, in fact, the peripheral production enterprises under the Far Side Group have now taken out the Pokémon series.

Pokémon has now become one of the famous IPs of Yuanfang Group.

If you talk about the influence of movie works, the phenomenal IP "Marvel" in recent years may be well-deserved; if you compare the loyalty and madness of fans, then "Star Wars" may be difficult to find opponents, but if you use "gold-absorbing ability" as the judging criterion, the "Pokémon" led by "Pikachu" is really well-deserved.

In the past life, Wikipedia counted a list called the best-selling list of media franchise products, and it can be seen through this gang that in the past 20 years before Zhou Fangyuan's rebirth, the copyright owners of Pokémon products have made a cumulative profit of more than 90 billion US dollars through product sales and derivative licensing, ranking first in major film and television animation and game IPs. This figure is higher than Disney's "Mickey Mouse" ($70 billion) and "Star Wars" ($65 billion), and more than three times that of "Marvel movies" ($28 billion).

So, how did "Pokémon", or "Pikachu", become popular all over the world?

In 1989, Nintendo, one of the world's three major video game giants, launched an epoch-making product, the GameBoy. Driven by the famous game "Tetris", GB received wide acclaim as soon as it came out, and the game "Tetris" alone achieved tens of millions of sales within two months of its launch.

It was also around the same time that "game enthusiast" Tomoshi Tajiri founded GameFreak, a game development club, to try to make some action games. In Tajiri's view, the most distinctive feature of GB is not the company's main thinness, but its "connection communication function", which reminds him of his childhood when he and his friends caught insects, interacted with insects and fought against each other, and thus came up with the idea of developing a game of breeding and exchanging "insects" - "Pokemon" took shape.

It so happened that in 1994, due to the advent of 32-bit consoles such as 3DO, SS, AND PS, the sales of GB, which were not superior in capacity and image quality, began to decline, and the annual sales in Japan plummeted from more than 3 million units to 1.81 million units, and the number of software sales also dropped from nearly 18 million to 10.3 million. In order to get out of the crisis, Nintendo began to focus on finding new selling points for GB, and "Pokemon", which was developed by GameFreak and emphasized the new concept of communication battles, attracted attention.

In 1996, the original Pokemon games, Pokemon Red and Pokemon Green, which had been in development for six years, were officially released. It's a pity that GB was no longer the most popular handheld on the market at that time, so "Pokemon" didn't make much waves in the early days, and only sold 200,000 copies in a month.

However, at the same time as the launch of the original "Pokemon", a manga "Pippi" based on the characters in the game began to be serialized. In the manga, Pikachu only appears as a supporting character, and the real protagonist is another Pokémon Pipsqueak, and the art style and storyline are also relatively nonsensical, which is very different from the "Pokémon" series that the public is familiar with later, but it was popular with many readers at the time.

Seeing this, Nintendo began to use "Pippi" as a marketing position, for example, readers who purchased "Pippi" had the opportunity to participate in related activities and win a limited edition Pokémon "Dream". Since the number of "Fantasy" is only 100, relying on hunger marketing and the high popularity of "Pippi", it instantly attracted a large number of users to participate, and suddenly raised the popularity of "Pokemon".

By March 1997, "Pokemon" had jumped to the top 30 of Fuso's software sales list. The participation of more users has made the interaction and battle functions of "Pokemon" also have room to be displayed, and the game experience has been greatly increased. In the following two years, Nintendo revised the game and launched versions such as "Pokemon Blue", and the sales of the original "Pokemon" also increased year by year, and finally sold a total of 45 million units, becoming one of the highest-grossing games in Nintendo's history, and successfully revitalized the company's business.

Nintendo, which wants to take advantage of the victory, has continuously updated its handheld equipment, successively launched new products such as GameBoy Color and GameBoy Advance, which have better graphics and is lighter, and on the other hand, it has continued to launch new "Pokemon" games with GameFreak. After 1999, the "Pokemon" series successively launched "Pokemon Gold and Silver", 7 generations of handheld games and a large number of derivative games and console games, with a total of more than 70 models, global cumulative sales of more than 300 million sets, and won 8 related world records issued by Guinness World Records, laying the foundation for the popularity of this IP around the world.

However, due to the limited ability to develop and update Game Freak games in the early days, Nintendo, which was worried about the decline in the popularity of "Pokemon", approached Shogakukan, the largest publishing group in Fuso, to work together to create derivative comics and animations of the IP to buy time for game development. In 1997, while "Pokemon" became more and more popular, the first "Pokemon" anime was officially launched. In this series, Pikachu, who is very popular in the game, replaced Pipsqueak as the protagonist and became the spokesperson of the Pokémon IP.

Creating a Pokémon animation proved to be the right choice. Compared to games with a certain threshold (which require equipment), with the help of television and the gradual rise of the Internet, animation has become a better medium for Pokémon.

During the broadcast of the original "Pokémon", the average rating reached more than 10%, and the average rating of some of the quartz alliance in the later period even exceeded 15%, and almost every episode ranked in the top 10 ratings in the same period; the theme song of the animation "The Goal is Pokémon Master" also won 1.85 million album sales in Fuso; before Zhou Fangyuan's rebirth, 80% of the average ratings of the average number of episodes in the 6 seasons of "Pokémon" and more than 1,000 episodes ranked in the top 10 in the same period.

And at the same time that the influence of "Pokémon" in Japan is gradually increasing, the IP operator is also constantly promoting it to the world.

In the United States, "Pokémon" and Disney and other companies have had in-depth cooperation, in 2000 alone, more than 25 million copies of animation DVDs, VCDs; Indian statistics show that the series was once the most user-used animation among viewers aged 4-14; "Pokémon" was broadcast in 124 countries, even in 2016, Netflix also revealed that "Pokémon" is one of the most popular series on Netflix.

The popularity of "Pokémon" and the expansion of the global influence of the "Pokemon" game have gradually occupied an increasingly important position in the hearts of users around the world. In 1999, Pokémon appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and Pikachu was named the second most influential person of the year by Time, calling him "the most beloved animated character after Hello Kitty".

Since then, the influence of Pokémon has tended to go beyond the field of pure entertainment and slowly become a cultural symbol. In the United States, Hillary Clinton and other politicians will even go to the rallies of Pokémon fans during the election to canvass for votes from this huge audience. In Fuso, Pikachu is regarded as a "national symbol", and when Fuso played in the World Cup in 2014, Pikachu defeated Doraemon and others, and joined forces with more than a dozen other Pokémon to become the mascot of the Fuso team.

With such a large global influence, the market value of Pokémon IP has naturally risen.

As early as 1998, Nintendo and Game Freak jointly established the Pokémon brand to do brand licensing and derivative product development, and successively established subsidiaries in Mi and South Korea for different markets. By 2003, Pikachu alone earned $800 million a year, and was even selected by Forbes as the "most profitable virtual character of the year".

The licensing and sale of peripheral derivatives is one of the most profitable Pokémon-related businesses, and the "list" data points out that the related revenue has reached more than $60 billion in two decades. Even Disney, the entertainment giant and the hegemon of the derivatives industry, can earn four or five billion US dollars a year from derivatives, but this is the result of the joint efforts of many phenomenal IPs such as Mickey Mouse, Marvel, and Star Wars, and Pokémon can sell an average of two or three billion US dollars a year for a single IP, which shows its influence.

In 2004, a year after Pokémon was launched in India, sales of licensed merchandise totaled more than 10 billion rupees, or $22.1 million, while in Europe, Pokémon-related toys were described as "dominant" by the local media, and the British Toy Industry Association had repeatedly awarded Toy of the Year awards to related products, and until 2017, in the United Kingdom, Italy and other places, the annual sales of Pokémon toys still increased by more than 50%.

In addition, video game sales are the oldest and most traditional monetization channel for Pokémon, and it is the most popular game IP on almost every generation of Nintendo handheld after GB. Pokémon's spin-off games have sold more than $17 billion and more than 300 million units worldwide, ranking second in total sales in video game history in terms of sales, second only to Nintendo's Mario, and the best-selling role-playing game in history.

If in the past, handheld games were one of the thresholds for the greatest popularity of Pokémon games, then the advent of the mobile game era has solved this problem well.

In the previous life, "Pokémon GO" was launched overseas in 2016, and it has accumulated 75 million downloads in half a year. By the end of 2018, Pokémon GO had attracted a total of $2.2 billion in player spending, including $795 million in revenue in 2018, an increase of 35% year-on-year. Its game developer, Niantic, raised $200 million in funding, valuing it at $4 billion.

This number, I ask you if you are afraid?

There is also card game sales, which is one of the most underestimated Pokémon monetization channels, but in fact, these seemingly inconspicuous pieces of paper have generated more than $10 billion in revenue. The official name of this card game is "Pokémon Trading Card Game", which is an officially licensed trading card game with the theme of Pokémon.

According to the data disclosed by the official website of Pokémon in the previous life, as of March 2018, PTCG has sold more than 25.7 billion copies worldwide; according to the statistics of NPD Group, an authoritative research company in the United States, in 2017, PTCG occupied more than 80% of the market share in the European strategic card market, and the annual sales in many countries increased by more than 400% year-on-year that year; License Global's survey shows that as early as 2016, PTCG has surpassed the "Yu-Gi-Oh" Become the best-selling player in the strategy card game category.

Like video games, PTCG has not entered the domestic market due to copyright, policy and market restrictions, but in Fuso, Europe, America and Hong Kong Island, PTCG has a good local popularity through large agents, and even has special tournaments. Not only that, but in the eyes of many collectors, PTCG is also extremely collectible, and some rare cards can even sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Finally, there is the revenue from anime and movies, which mainly includes the copyright income of comics and animation, as well as the box office revenue of theatrical films, and the cumulative global revenue has reached billions of dollars. Although this income is almost "negligible" compared to several other incomes, film, television and comics, as important carriers of Pokémon to maintain popularity and popularity, are still highly valued by Nintendo, Shogakukan and other relevant parties.

In addition to the nearly 1,000 episodes of anime and related manga mentioned above, since 1998, Pokémon will also release 1-2 theatrical versions every year. In 1998, the first theatrical version of Pokémon: Mewtwo's Counterattack was released, and it first achieved 7.3 billion yen in Japan (the second largest in the year), and then when the film was released in North America and other places, it also grossed more than $160 million, setting a box office record for a Japanese film in many countries and regions.

With such a big IP, of course, Zhou Fangyuan can't be indifferent, in his pan-cultural plan, movies, animation, comics, TV series, games, ...... and so on, it will form a perfect closed loop, and only one popular IP is needed to create an almost perfect circle. This point is not only inspired by others, but he has also tried it himself, and is deeply aware of the terrifying interests that exist in it, so he will take this step firmly. Not only the IPs that he already owns so far, but even those who have not yet been purchased, as long as they have proven their value in their previous lives, Zhou Fangyuan will not let them go.

It's like a Pokémon.

It's like the Gundam series.