About 50,000 people are attending PokémonXP and the 2026 Pokémon World Championships in San Francisco, California. Despite the huge turnout, The Pokémon Company International is aware of the disappointment among fans who either weren’t chosen for particular exclusive activities, or for tickets to the convention at all, and are already considering ways to improve. In a group interview, Chris Brown, Director, Global Esports and Events Producer at The Pokémon Company International, commented on the unique challenges producing an event with this much demand invites, how they may improve processes next time, and their plans for the future.
Getting Badges for PokémonXP and the World Championships
“The public is unaware of the level of demand,” Brown said. “And so, unfortunately, 50,000 people are coming [to PokémonXP], [but] more than that number get the disappointment of [not being] able to sign up.”
Interest list sign ups for 3-day Passes to PokémonXP, the first official Pokémon fan convention, began April 2, 2026, a little over seven months after it was announced during the closing ceremonies of the 2025 Pokémon World Championships. PokémonXP is occurring simultaneously as the Pokémon World Championships, which, last year, saw 30,000 attendees, more than double the number of the 2024 World Championships.
This year, demand far outnumbered supply, Brown said, with more than 130,000 people throwing their names into the hat for a 3-day or single-day badge to PokémonXP – more than twice the number of people who’d be granted entrance, which also includes competitors and their families.
“Basically, anytime your demand well outstrips your supply, the sort of interest list into lottery is the only real way you can handle that,” Brown said.
Brown described that this is true across the events industry, and if it were set up as a “first come, first serve” online purchasing system, the system would crash and people would error out, making it a worse experience for fans that’s basically a random chance, anyway.
“The only thing I can do from an event operator’s perspective is think about, how do we increase supply over time? From a system’s perspective, there’s honestly not a better system [than interest list into lottery] for that.”
PokémonXP: Improving Access to Special Activities
Over the years, more and more activities have been included in the Pokémon World Championships for fans who weren’t competing. One of these, for example, was the chance to get an autograph from an artist–which about “300ish,” or .03%, of attendees were able to participate in. Brown said this year a little over 2,000 people were able to participate in a special event activity, like autograph sessions and workshops. This is a small number compared to the more than 50,000 people who likely signed up for a chance to participate, but Brown said it’s about the same percentage as have been able to participate in these activities at Worlds in previous years.
Interest lists for these extra activities, like aforementioned artist meet-and-greet and autograph sessions or workshops like “Create Your Own Clay Pokémon with [TCG artist] Yuka Morii,” were handled similarly to sign up for passes in general: Interest list into lottery.
“A lot of people sign up, a lot of people can’t do it, and then there’s that disappointment layer,” Brown acknowledged. “And from an events perspective, we have to think, okay, is that rare experience worth the disappointment? And I don’t know the answer to that, actually.We want to offer some of those extra premium experiences. We want people to have an equal chance at that, so we allow an interest list to sign up.”
Brown said they’re already considering changes to the system in the future, by, for example, asking fans to include their priority when choosing activities.
“There are some obvious things we can probably do to make it better, but, there’s a philosophical problem, though, of just the supply is below what the demand level is. How do you manage that?” Brown asked. “And if anyone has suggestions, I’m always all ears. But I don’t think anyone in the industry’s really cracked that. And it’s just part of the challenge.”
The Pokémon team’s hope was that there’s so much at PokémonXP and the World Championships that not being chosen for a limited capacity activity wouldn’t detract from the experience for fans. There are partner booths and dozens of activities that are first come first serve attendees can line up for, side events for the video games and TCG on the World’s side of things, spectator seats for the tournaments, and panels featuring guests like Aardman Animations (known for Wallace and Gromit, who are animating the new Pokémon Tales: The Misadventures of Sirfetch’d & Pichu), and President and CEO of The Pokémon Company, Tsunekazu Ishihara, who has been a part of the Pokémon franchise since the very beginning.
Ultimately, Brown said success of the event and priorities for changes will come from attendee feedback. For every single event, TPCi measures fan feedback with surveys. The results are converted into a Net Promoter Score (NPS) for internal evaluation. They make a point to read every single text response–which was more than 3,000 from last year’s World Championships, for example.
“Last year’s pin trading was our second highest NPS score of the activities we did [at the 2025 Pokémon World Championships,” Brown said. “So we’ve got 12 pin trading stations [at PokémonXP]. We’ve got 300,000 pins we’re giving out at no cost. We did that in response to how well it was received.”
Brown continued: “Now we’ve got a new problem. Very big lines and a lot of demand for those. So we will learn and try to make that better.”
Will there be a PokémonXP next year? Brown said that for now, they’re going to see how this year’s event goes and decide “what comes next after we get all the feedback and really understand how people receive this year.”
Growing Pokémon Events and Future Host Cities
Regardless of attendee feedback, Brown said one big shift they’re looking to make is the number of competitors invited to the Pokémon World Championships.
“This year, we qualified about 3,300 [players] globally. We’ve got about 2,700 that showed up. Our intent over the next five years is to try to double the number of competitive qualified players,” Brown said.
This is still the goal after capping the number of qualifying competitors to a “Top X” format instead of allowing all with a certain number of points earned in a season. During the 2024 Pokémon World Championships in Honolulu, Brown said the team underestimated the number of players who would qualified by about a thousand players, making for a very cramped event.
Specifically, Brown said they want to really focus on the Juniors and Seniors age divisions, as currently, they’re very uneven when compared to the number of Masters division players. To do so, they’re going to work across their global markets and ecosystems to solve just how to do that. The other challenge they’re facing, he said, is finding spaces globally that allow TCPi to host the growing number of attendees, regardless if there’s a PokémonXP event running alongside the Pokémon World Championships.
“There’s only so many, not just cities that have that infrastructure, but [aligned dates] between these two things. And so there will be years that may not be as large as others, because on a long term lens, the world championships, our intent is to move it around,” Brown said.
The World Championships have been in the U.S. for a couple of years, and Brown said some of that was to simplify their operations a bit to maximize success for this year’s PokémonXP. And despite it being easier, they’re not going to let that limit the locations they choose to host the Pokémon World Championships.
“We are going to look outside the U.S., obviously,” Brown said. “ We have to, because the [Pokémon] World Championships is meant to serve the world, and for it to do that most effectively, it needs to move around between markets, so that fans anywhere know and players anywhere know that there’s a chance Worlds could be getting close to them at some point.”
The first time the Pokémon World Championships was held outside North America was in 2022 in London, United Kingdom. The following year saw it held in Yokohama, Japan. Typically, TPCi announces next year’s location during the Pokémon World Championships’ closing ceremonies, which we’ll be reporting on as they happen Sunday night.
For more on PokémonXP and the Pokémon World Championships for now, you can read about how The Pokémon Company’s Ishihara says a challenge for them will be figuring out integrating wearable technology, and brand new info revealed during a PokémonXP panel about the new Pokémon Tales: The Misadventures of Sirfetch’d and Pichu series.
