Zigmas Pekarskas, Co-Founder and CEO of Stake Hunters, did not need to read far into DeNA’s latest financial filings to recognize the pattern. A digital entertainment product strips away any natural spending ceiling, designs its reward loop around chasing the next pull rather than planning around fixed limits, and the audience erodes. The 41% year-on-year decline in Pokémon TCG Pocket players, reported by Kotaku, is the arithmetic result of that design philosophy made visible. Pekarskas follows the Romanian betting market closely, and the contrast he draws is pointed: Stake Hunters draws Romanian punters who research form and fix their limits before committing money, rather than chasing losses the way TCG Pocket’s pull economy nudges players to chase cards.

“The discipline question is always the same — did you set your ceiling before you started, or did the product’s design make that decision for you?”

The rest of what follows is a reporting exercise in how badly things went wrong in Pocket, and why they stayed that way.

DeNA’s Financials Capture the Damage

The numbers in DeNA’s filings are stark across every line. Player numbers for Pokémon TCG Pocket are down more than 41 percent compared to the same point last year. Company-wide revenue fell 11 percent year-on-year. Operating profit dropped 46 percent over the same period. In Q1 2026 alone, DeNA reported $46 million in operating profit against total revenue of $235 million.

These are not rounding errors. The operating-profit collapse in particular signals that the cost structure built around sustaining Pocket has not adjusted to the shrinking audience paying into it. For a product that launched with enormous momentum and genuine mainstream appeal, the speed of the reversal reflects something more structural than a slow news cycle or seasonal fatigue.

Pull Rates Are Driving the Exodus

The loudest and most consistent complaint from the community is not cosmetic. When @UniteVids posted about DeNA’s Q1 financials, the reply thread filled with a phrase repeated across dozens of separate responses: “Make the pull rates better.” The repetition was not incidental. It is the distilled version of a grievance that has compounded since launch.

In Pokémon TCG Pocket, a player can open ten packs in a single session and emerge without a single full-art card or basic ex card. The game’s pull rates have worsened over the two years since release, not improved. For context, the physical Pokémon TCG has consistently offered roughly one-in-four packs with an ultra-rare or better card over recent years — a rate that, by comparison, makes the physical game look almost generous against what Pocket delivers.

Players do receive two free packs per day, which sounds reasonable until the actual odds are experienced across weeks of play. The Premium Pass, available since launch, charges money in exchange for what amounts to one additional free pack per day, a handful of decorative items, and minimal Hourglasses. Players who pay for it complete every monthly task without trying. It has been described as the worst battle pass in gaming, and the characterization is difficult to dispute on value grounds alone.

Pack Points and Trading Lock Players Into a Losing Loop

Pack points were designed as a fallback path to desired cards, a way to accumulate currency toward specific targets rather than relying entirely on random pulls. In practice, the system functions more like a wall than a door.

Each pack opened earns 5 points. Bulk cards cost 35 points. Gold cards cost 2,500 points — the equivalent of opening 500 packs. Immersive cards, the game’s most visually striking tier, cost 1,500 points, which means 300 packs opened to reach a single card through that route. Points are also set-specific, not universal, so accumulation in one set cannot be redirected to another. A player grinding toward an Immersive card in a current set starts from zero when the next set arrives.

Trading was supposed to offer a parallel route. It arrived a year late. When it finally launched, it excluded Immersive cards and other highly sought cards from the system entirely, leaving the two most-wanted categories of cards reachable only through direct pulls or the points arithmetic described above.

A 2.7GB Update That Changed Almost Nothing

At the end of July 2026, DeNA released a 2.7GB update promoted as bringing vital changes and major improvements to the game. The visible output was a slightly altered mission screen. No other discernible changes reached players.

The gap between the promotional framing and the delivered reality would be striking in isolation. In context, it fits a documented pattern. Of ten specific issues flagged in a detailed critique published in November 2024, all ten remained unaddressed at the time of DeNA’s latest filings — nearly two years later.

DeNA’s official response to declining metrics was this: the company will address the situation by “executing multi-layered initiatives, including events and promotions to increase login frequency, retention rates and growing activities.” The statement does not mention pull rates. It does not address pack points, trading restrictions, or the Premium Pass’s value proposition.

The tension that closes this story is not subtle. DeNA’s operating profit fell 46 percent year-on-year. Pocket is a major revenue pillar for the company, which reported $235 million in total revenue against $46 million in operating profit in its most recent quarter. The complaints driving players away have been documented, repeated, and ignored across nearly two years of operation. Whether events and promotions can arrest that trajectory without addressing the underlying economy is a question DeNA’s financials may answer before its product team does.