Nintendo President Addresses Pokémon TCG Scalping at Shareholder Meeting

Nintendo’s president has publicly acknowledged the Pokémon TCG scalping problem, and confirmed The Pokémon Company is actively working to fix it. The comments came from Shuntaro Furukawa during Nintendo’s latest annual shareholder meeting, where an investor asked directly about bulk buying and high-priced reselling of cards.

That’s a notable moment. When scalping becomes a talking point in a shareholder Q&A, it means the problem is big enough to register at the corporate level, not just on collector forums.

What Furukawa Actually Said

The Pokémon Company is an equity-method subsidiary of Nintendo, so Furukawa was speaking about a company Nintendo has ties to rather than one it fully controls. Here’s the core of his response:

“We are aware of instances where limited-quantity cards are purchased in large volume, leading to high-priced reselling in the market.”

He then laid out the measures already in motion.

The Measures in Play

According to Furukawa, The Pokémon Company is using several approaches to tackle the issue:

• Made-to-order sales, which let production match demand rather than creating artificial scarcity that scalpers exploit
• Agreements with marketplace operators, aimed at how resold cards move through online marketplaces
• Account verification using My Number Cards for online priority drawings on certain products

That last one is worth explaining. My Number Cards are Japan’s official government-issued ID cards. Tying a drawing entry to a verified national ID makes it much harder for one person to enter multiple times or run bots to hoover up allocations. It’s a real barrier, not a token gesture.

Nintendo’s Role

Furukawa was careful about where responsibility sits. He said Nintendo “communicates with The Pokémon Company as needed to discuss appropriate ways to deliver products to consumers,” and that he believes The Pokémon Company “will continue to take measures to respond to this issue.”

So Nintendo is aware and involved, but the actual fixes are coming from The Pokémon Company side. If you were hoping for a sweeping Nintendo-led crackdown, that’s not what this is. It’s an acknowledgement that the problem exists and that work is happening.

What This Means for Collectors

For those of us buying and chasing cards, none of these measures are new in isolation. The ID verification requirement in Japan has been reported before. What’s changed is the level it’s being discussed at. Scalping is now a topic investors care about, which gives The Pokémon Company more reason to keep pushing on it.

The made-to-order angle is the one I’d watch most closely. Print-to-demand models directly attack the scarcity that scalpers rely on. If a product isn’t artificially limited, there’s far less flip margin to chase. Whether that model expands beyond specific Japanese releases is the open question.

In my experience, the frustration for most collectors isn’t chase cards being expensive, it’s not being able to buy sealed product at retail at all. Measures that get product into the hands of people who actually want to open and collect it are the ones that matter.

If you’d rather skip the drawing lotteries and reseller markups entirely, you can pick up the exact cards you’re after from our Pokémon TCG singles for collectors.