The latest Pokemon Presents event was live-streamed on February 27, 2024, on the occasion of Pokemon Day, and featured exciting news about the media franchise. It was covered by many prominent content creators on streaming services like Twitch and YouTube, including VTubers associated with leading talent agencies like hololive and NIJISANJI.
For those unaware, here's a short refresher, with the entire wrap-up available on the official link. Pokemon Presents 2024 saw the announcement of two new games — Pokemon Legends: Z-A and Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket — aside from updates on Pokemon Scarlet and Pokemon Violet, a collaboration between Pokemon GO and Pokemon Horizons: The Series, Pokemon Masters EX, Pokemon UNITE, Pokemon Sleep, and Pokemon Cafe ReMix.
Pokemon Legends: Z-A, arriving in 2025, is set in Lumiose City and features an urban redevelopment plan with a vision of people and Pokémon living together in harmony. Meanwhile, Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket, hailed as a free-to-start app with new "immersive cards," is coming to iOS and Android devices in 2024.
The official broadcasts of this event on Pokemon's YouTube and Twitch handles were nowhere near the most sought-after. Instead, it was the simultaneous casting by streamers like Knekro and Sasaki Saku that caught the attention of fans and online users during its 25-minute-odd runtime.
These two were among the ten most popular and watched names when it came to this special live stream from Pokemon. The former was the topper in the latter metric by a long shot, with his content known to focus on this legendary franchise, including playing in and hosting tournaments in the series' various games.
Among other updates were Tera Raid Battles coming to Pokemon Scarlet and Pokemon Violet and a special Pokemon Horizons: The Series collaboration coming to Pokemon GO from next month. Moreover, fans of Pokemon UNITE can rejoice as more creatures are coming to the game, with Legendary Pokemon also arriving soon in Pokemon Sleep, including the renowned Entei.
Twitch chat dynamics from Pokemon Presents 2024
When looking at the chat dynamics on the purple platform for yesterday, it is clear that quite a lot of users were interested in happenings around this official live broadcast. A week before it aired, the number of mentions of the word 'Pokemon' across all channels was 23.2K, which went up to 83K on the day of the event, a whopping rise of 257%.
The number of channels where the franchise was being discussed also rose by 40.4% as the count of users increased by 205.9%. Moreover, there were 78.8K messages containing the word 'Pokemon' across all the channels for February 27, totaling 83K mentions.
Just the word Pokemon saw the highest activity, receiving 7.36K mentions from 7.32K messages across 2.2K channels. Pokemon Day and Pokemon Z (possibly referring to the new title coming next year) were the next two most used phrases by users on Twitch chat as excitement for all the updates that Tsunekazu Ishihara — President and CEO of The Pokemon Company — had for fans were slowly disclosed.
The numbers above show why Pokemon remains perhaps the most recognizable and famous media product ever. As per Statista, it is one of the world's most successful gaming franchises, with 440M-plus games sold as of June 2022, while its Red/Green/Blue Version placed among the five best-selling console games of all time in 2021, a quarter-century after its release.
