33MB, $20, 4 Million Sold: FireRed and LeafGreen Won

"We remain focused on offering classic games through Nintendo Switch Online and Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack," Nintendo said in a Q&A back in February, defending its decision to sell Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen as standalone $19.99 eShop downloads rather than folding them into the subscription service. That line reads differently now. According to Nintendo's latest financial report, the two GBA ports have sold a combined 4 million copies in just six weeks.

Let's do the rough maths. Four million copies at $19.99 each is somewhere around $80 million in revenue, generated by a pair of games that are 33.4MB in size and originally launched in 2004. No visual filters, no quality-of-life overhaul, no bundled extras. Nintendo shipped the most minimal viable port imaginable, charged twenty dollars for it, and the internet's outrage evaporated the moment people opened their wallets. I'm not even mad; I'm impressed by how cleanly this proves that nostalgia is the single most powerful force in gaming retail.

The backlash was real, though. When Nintendo announced the re-releases in February, players pointed out that every other GBA title on Switch gets added to the Online + Expansion Pack library at no additional cost. Selling FireRed and LeafGreen separately, with no visual enhancements and a newly added profanity filter (required for Pokémon Home and Champions compatibility), felt like Nintendo testing exactly how much the Pokémon brand could get away with. Four million copies says: quite a lot.

$80 Million from a 22-Year-Old ROM

To put the 4 million figure in context, the original GBA releases of FireRed and LeafGreen sold around 12 million copies lifetime. These ports have already hit a third of that number in a month and a half, on a console that's at the tail end of its life. Nintendo didn't even need to bundle them together; they sold each game individually and people bought both. There's a legitimate technical argument for why these couldn't just be NSO titles, since the subscription service lets players create alternate save files, which would wreak havoc with Pokémon duplication. But Nintendo never actually made that argument publicly. It didn't need to. The sales spoke louder than any justification could.

FireRed and LeafGreen aren't the only Pokémon success story in the report. Pokémon Pokopia, the experimental new entry on Switch 2, also crossed 4 million copies, doing so in five weeks rather than six. That's a strong debut for a game on hardware with a relatively small install base, and retailers in multiple countries were sold out at launch.

The obvious question now is whether Nintendo repeats this playbook with Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald. Fans have already speculated those releases are coming, partly because completing FireRed and LeafGreen's post-game Pokédex requires creatures only available in the Hoenn games. Nintendo hasn't confirmed anything, but after generating this kind of revenue from a pair of bare-bones ports, I'd be stunned if they didn't. No new mainline Pokémon game is scheduled until Pokémon Winds and Waves arrive on Switch 2 in 2027, which leaves a very convenient gap in the release calendar. The sales data in this financial report gave Nintendo every reason to fill it with another round of GBA re-releases, and the pricing precedent is already set.