The 2025PokemonNorth American International Championships just wrapped up, closing off one of the biggest events in eSports. With the event meeting new peaks in attendance and participation, it takes more and more effort to organize one of the world’s biggest recurringPokemonevents.
The results are in for this year’s event, with a lucky few becoming the2025PokemonNAIC winners. Adjacent to the competition was an incredibly successful and well-organized event, even with attendance numbers climbing higher and higher each year. Game Rant sat down with TPCi Director, Global Esports & Events Producer Chris Brown to speak about the changes that have been made for 2025’s events, as well as how organizers deal with increasing attendance.This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
How The 2025 Pokemon NAIC Was Organized
2025’s Changes
Q:One of the most interesting changes coming into this year was the adjustment in Worlds' qualifications, shifting now to the top 75 per region. Do you have any thoughts on how that’s played out thus far?
Brown:Good question. Obviously, players were a little apprehensive about the change. Our intent was still to run the world’s largest world championship—you know, we’re qualifying almost 3000 players globally across our four game pillars. From a data perspective, regional attendance in all markets is up: we sold out our oldest divisions in most of our events for the year. For example, across I think30TCGMasters premier events, all but 3 sold out. The big thing we’ll be watching this show is how players react because now it’s a situation where your fate’s not fully in your hands because you don’t know how other people perform. You can’t hit this clear point bar to know you’re in. We know that’s an area players are worried about, but on our end, the goal is still to create the best Worlds experience for our players.
We also wanted to define what it meant to be a world-level player, and from this perspective, I think the world championships will be more competitive and of a higher quality and caliber—while still being very generous in terms of how many players are going to qualify.
Q: When it comes to defining that world-championship approach, how does something like reworking the numbers a little bit or changing how the qualifiers work become the way forward?
A:It’s a balancing act. There’s not a perfect formula. If there were, every competitive circuit would run it; if you look at the market, everyone does things a little differently. Again, I think we’re unique in that we’re very generous in how deep we go with the number of players that can qualify per age division, per market.
We also have mechanics when you’re in, so if you win a regional, you’re going to the world championships. You get the invite. You could consider this event in many cases like a last-chance qualifier, so if you happen to be one of the top players in the world, hopefully you can get into one of the top places in this show. In that case, you’ll get that invite, and this would be the only show you go to all year. I guess the short answer is, again, it’s a balancing act. We want the best players at Worlds, and we also want players who are very good with season-long accomplishments that go along with that to be at Worlds. At some point though, logistically, there has to be a cutoff.
We have to book the world championships years out—the space, the floor plans, even things like how many welcome kits somebody gets. One of our challenges at the point bar was that we could not actually fully predict how many people would be there. Sometimes we weren’t setting our floor plans until five weeks before the show, and we had to really over-order things like our welcome kits to make sure that there was one for every player, which sometimes led to an incredible amount of waste. Those are the logistical details that the players don’t necessarily think about, but they’re why we sort of necessitated this change in the system too.
Q: Every player hopes to get to that final day, but most don’t. How much thought and consideration has been put into evolving these events to be an experience, as something to enjoy outside the competition? You see a lot of things for attendees to do if they’re not competing. How has that evolved over time?
A:When I started TPCi 12 years ago, it was really just aTCGtournament and a video game tournament. Since then, we’ve added broadcasting,we’ve addedPokemon Unite, we’ve addedPokemon GOcompetitively, and we’ve added a lot of activations forPokemon GOin the game. We put a ton of thought into trying to treat the show as something that brings the whole world ofPokemontogether, and by doing that, we hope to bring the world together throughPokemon.
As we continue to build out the show, the goal really is to find that balance. We’ve got this fantastic competitive core, but then we also have all of our fans who may not be competitive who feel that there’s something for them at the show—whether you’re here for the day pass with your family and you’re doing origami or coloring, or maybe you’re lightly into PVP and you can play in side events.
Obviously, we have demos. WhenScarlet and Violetwent by, they were being demoed here. We have Playlab so that you can get your first chance to play, and that’s been expanded to include other products from theTCG. Now we havePokemon Scarlet and VioletandPokemon Unitein theretoo, so our hope is to really have a whole brand, convention, and showcase—all with the competition at its core.
Q: With that mindset of balancing the casual and competitive appeal of these events, is there a different kind of approach that goes into a regional, as opposed to an IC or a world, because of the difference in who’s showing up and what kind of audience is going to be watching on the global stage?
A:There are some resource constraints if it’s everything at every show. Our goal for the regional championships is a competitive-first event.
Having said that, those events have gotten very big—in North America, there’s about 5000 average attendance, unique for regional championships; of that, about 3500 or so are players. With the increase in players, that’s more parents, that’s more siblings, and that’s more friends that come, all of whom aren’t players. By design, we have to come up with something that makes them happy—that makes them have a great show, that brings them into the community, that makes them feel connected to theirfriends who are intoPokemon.
With our regional championships, the goal is to run a great competition first and foremost, but actually we’re seeing that same necessity at that level of also trying to figure out what makes people have a great time with the show if they’re not competitive. We’ve got side events, as well as other sorts of scavenger hunts and other activities too, and we’re constantly looking at what we can add. The brand is so rich; we’re very fortunate that there are so many different things we can pull from—there are like 4 different licensed board games that we can use!
I’m always surprised at just how many people come in and play the board games, do origami, do coloring, etc. We have a lot of things we can offer in our shows, and we’re constantly expanding it. We sort of start with the world championships and our international championships, and as things work out there, we push them lower into the regionals too.
The Growing Scale of Pokemon NAIC Attendance
Q: You’ve noted that these events continue to get bigger and bigger. Are there any factors that you guys have identified as to why we’ve seen such great growth within the scene?
A:First, I’d say the brand is doing very well—everything leads with the video games. We got our new animation, we gotPokemon Horizons, and the trading card game’s obviously doing very well, so a lot of people are coming into the brand. On our end, I think when we look at the competitive side of things, we’ve made a lot of investments in our events to create the best production for the type of shows we’re doing. We’re running the largest publisher-run eSports circuit in North America, and I think when you go to all levels of our show, you can look at what we’re doing, what we hear, and what we measure: player sentiment, which is all extremely positive. You go to a show, the show is very positive, you tell your friends, and things have been snowballing now because we’ve been doing it for about 20 years. I think the other key part for us is that we broadcast each of these regional championships in North America and in Europe, so every week or two, you can come online and watch. You can kind of see what our community is and say, ‘Hey, I want to get into that, I’m interested in this.’
Then finally, I’d say we’ve made a ton of investments in our store network. We have a network of thousands of hobby shops, and we have thousands of professors around the world to help run tournaments. So for anyone who is interested (maybe they watched the broadcast, maybe they purchased the product, maybethey downloadedPokemon GO) and says, ‘Hey, I want to get into competitive’ or ‘I want to find my community,’ there is a store in their backyard, very likely right down the street. They can go to the nearest hobby shop, they can enter thePokemonLeague, and they may never even sort of go into that event space—they might just find their community there and that’s great. But if they get interested in competitive, in most cases, there will be a regional within driving distance of them, at least in a given season.
Q: What are the benefits of coming back to a place like New Orleans and getting a chance to learn from what was done last year? What does that do for the structure of the competitive environment and the experience?
A:From an event operation standpoint, it’s obviously a lot easier the second time you do a show in the same location. It’s a sort of ‘Oh, here was our floorplan last year, we’ll make this change,’ so right away most attendees are probably noticing a little bit more of a smoother experience this year. That’s just because we’re not figuring out their operations for the first time in a new location.
I talked to a few attendees, and sometimes I just hand out booster packs at random. Sometimes I’ll give it to a parent and their kid, and they’re like, ‘Oh, I got this last year!’ They had spectator passes, so they weren’t even competing, but they had a Saturday pass and they’re here again. It’s great to see that. One of the benefits you get from being in the same location for a couple of years in a row is, if you had a good time last year, it’s on your calendar now—we know you’re coming. You’re going to make some time and carve it out and go to that show, and hopefully you’ve told your friends about it. In this particular case, you know, this is our largest North American championship, ever—bigger than last year, which was bigger than the previous years before that. The word of mouth is definitely helping.
For the competitors, we do want the cities we host to offer, you know, not just the convention center. We’re very, very happy with New Orleans because there’s a lot to do and see in the city. The city has a lot of culture, and we were able to bring some of that into the opening ceremonies this year. We hope that our competitors feel that they got more than just a tournament, that they were able to experience the city in the community with their friends and with their family.
Q: When it comes to trying to entice people to either try the product or continue watching online, what kind of thought process goes into those kinds of things—the next kind of activation?
A:We work really closely with our marketing and community teams, who also work with the game developers on things like Twitch drops and game rewards. I saw some of the chat this weekend, and it was like ‘Hey, wow, this reward’s great! I’m probably going to boot the game up for the first time in a long time.’ I think we like to see that because that’s obviously re-acquiring somebody that’s lapsed, which is an important aspect of it.
I think the first thing we look at, though, is actually just broadcast quality in general. We want to tell stories, we want to tell the stories of the player, and we want to tell the stories of the event. We want to highlight who our champions are, but also that journey to become the champion. We’re constantly innovating from that experience, and then things like viewer awards are sort of complementary to that holistic experience and approach.
If you were to watch on Twitch, there’s a new add-on there which provides not just subtitles and close captioning, but also translation into, you know, French, Italian, German, Spanish, etc. So we’re making it more accessible, which is part of the overall viewer experience, because not everyone obviously might understand English. Unfortunately, we’re not at a point where we’re broadcasting in half a dozen languages across the world, but that sort of technology feature has hopefully made the broadcast something more people can get into as a result.
Q: You’re always asking players to tell you the memorable matches they remember. What kind of stories would you like to hear? What kind of importance do you put on the player voice to find what comes next when it comes to the content that you’re putting into the broadcast or any iterations you make with the events themselves?
A:The team is constantly talking to the players, trying to understand what they want. That’s the core audience that’s watching, and if they don’t find it enjoyable, we’re probably not doing our job. I think there were some ideas that we were tossing around recently, and it was like ‘OK, we like this idea and now let’s go talk to some people and see what their response is,’ and the response was not particularly great. So we changed what we were going to do because we saw that it wasn’t going to connect the way we wanted it to.
When I come to these shows, the players let me know what’s working and what’s not. I’m always asking, and all of our team across The Pokemon Company is doing the same because our goal is to make the best show possible. You’re only going to do that if you talk to the fans; you talk to the players and understand what works for them.
Obviously, there’s a balancing act. We have limited hours in the day, but our hope is that we’re able to provide a great experience for those players. The big challenge of this show, for example, is that 4000+TCGmasters register for the show. That’s huge, and we’re running out of hours in the day to run the show, so there’s a give and take, but yeah—every player is super important.
Q: One thing many players have noticed over the years is that the accessibility to being able to compete has improved a lot within the games. Over the years, have you been able to work closely with developers and share feedback with them in order to ensure that it’s more accessible for everyone to participate?
A:Yes! With Game Freak, it’s a long development cycle. They solicit what we’d like to do with tournaments, almost 2+ years ahead of the game. I’d say an example of some of the things that they’ve done in the past would be accessibility things like rental teams, obviously. But also the world finals often have a special stage just for the finals with its own custom music, so the game developers really care about the community and these competitions to take the time to sort of build this stuff.Pokemon Unitehas a tournament modebuilt into the game product that all players are able to access and play in our online tournaments. When they do that, all the licenses are unlocked so that they can play on an equal footing.
We’re constantly talking with the game developers, and they’re looking at, you know, what our needs are to put on a great tournament.Pokemon Unitehas another example, where we have a LAN mode built just for these live events, in order to make that player experience more seamless because removing latency makes for a better player experience. These things take time and energy from the game developer side, and we’re very fortunate that we’ve got a great link between our events and our eSports teams when talking with them.
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