Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa announced that The Pokémon Company is implementing “various measures,” including account verification via Japan’s national My Number Card and order-based sales, to combat large-scale scalping of the Pokémon Trading Card Game. The move follows reports of limited-edition cards being bought in bulk and resold at inflated prices, despite a production surge of 10 billion cards in 2025 alone.
The scale of the Pokémon TCG ecosystem has reached an industrial level. According to official figures released by The Pokémon Company, 85 billion cards have been produced globally to date. The acceleration is stark: between October 1996 and March 2022, the company printed 43 billion cards over 25 years. In the four years following March 2022, they produced nearly that same amount again.
Supply is no longer the primary bottleneck. Demand is.
How the “My Number Card” integration stops automated bots
The most aggressive technical pivot in Furukawa’s strategy is the shift toward account verification using the My Number Card. For those outside Japan, this is the national identity system. By tying a purchase attempt to a government-verified ID, The Pokémon Company is effectively killing the “bot farm” model. Most scalping operations rely on creating thousands of ephemeral accounts to flood checkout queues the millisecond a product drops.
This is a move toward a “closed-loop” distribution system. By requiring a unique, verified national ID, the company can implement a strict one-per-person limit that is computationally difficult to spoof. It moves the battle from the network layer—where bots win via speed—to the identity layer, where the human is the only valid token.
This approach mirrors strategies seen in highly regulated sectors or government-backed digital IDs. While it solves the scalping issue, it creates a friction point for casual users. It is a ruthless trade-off: convenience for the many is sacrificed to eliminate the profit margins of the few.
Why 10 billion cards weren’t enough to stabilize prices
The numbers are staggering. In 2025, The Pokémon Company printed 10 billion cards—surpassing the total human population of Earth. Yet, market prices for rare “chase” cards remain volatile. This proves that the “scarcity” in the Pokémon TCG isn’t about total volume, but about the specific distribution of high-value assets within those sets.
- Total Production (1996-2022): 43 billion cards.
- Total Production (2022-2026): nearly the same amount of cards.
- 2025 Annual Output: 10 billion cards.
The current strategy involves “sales on order” and deeper collaborations with online marketplace administrators. This suggests Nintendo and The Pokémon Company are looking beyond their own storefronts to the secondary markets where the actual price gouging occurs. They are attempting to choke the supply chain at the point of entry.
The 30th Anniversary risk and the September deadline
Timing is everything. The Pokémon TCG is preparing for a special 30th Anniversary set scheduled for release in September. Given the current climate, this set is a prime target for the very scalpers Furukawa is targeting. If the My Number Card verification and order-based systems aren’t fully operational by the launch, the anniversary set could see the same hyper-inflation as previous limited runs.
Nintendo’s role here is as a strategic overseer. As a stakeholder in The Pokémon Company, Nintendo provides the corporate backing and high-level direction, but the operational execution lies with The Pokémon Company. Furukawa noted that Nintendo is consulting on “appropriate ways” to get products to consumers, signaling a coordinated effort to protect the brand’s accessibility.
The broader implication is a shift in how “collectibles” are managed in the digital age. We are seeing the death of the open-market “drop” and the rise of the verified-identity queue. This is an admission that the open web is currently unconquerable by standard CAPTCHAs or email verification.
The Verdict on Nintendo’s Anti-Scalping Pivot
The move to government ID verification is a nuclear option. It is an admission that the gap between retail availability and secondary market pricing has become a systemic failure rather than a temporary shortage. By integrating with the My Number Card, The Pokémon Company is treating card scalping not as a hobbyist nuisance, but as a fraudulent activity requiring state-level identity verification to solve.
For the average collector, this means the era of “refreshing the page” is over. The future of high-demand TCG releases will likely be characterized by pre-verified accounts and lottery-based allocations, removing the “speed” element from the equation entirely.
