Make no mistake: Pokémon Go and Fortnite earn a lot of money

For all that they’re free-to-play, games like Pokémon Go and Fortnite can rack up the sales, especially as of late per new reports.

Free, downloadable games are just part of the culture at this point; if you have a smartphone, you probably have one or two for those moments where you need to kill some time but aren’t sure what to do. But these games are an also immensely big business. Take Pokémon Go and Fortnite — two of the biggest names out there right now.

Per The Hollywood Reporter, both of those games made over $100 million last month. In the case of Pokémon, it was a solid $104 million, but Fortnite — which does have paid modes, in the interest of clarity, although Save the World will become free later this year — grossed $318 million.

Now, indications of sales do not a place on the Fandom 250 make, at least not solely. But FanSided as a network will look at those sorts of sales to gauge a fandom’s passion for their chosen thing, and it’s hard to deny that both Fortnite (which didn’t make last year’s list) and Pokémon (which did at number 33 overall and topped the gaming list) have strong points to make about their fandoms being willing to spend oodles of cash to show support for these two games.

But it also indicates that no matter how certain subsets of gamers might decry the explosion of free-to-download games as letting casuals into the market, it’s also a welcome area of expansion and innovation.

Look at Pokémon Go, for example, taking Nintendo’s skill with handheld gaming and translating that to a smartphone experience, meaning that you don’t need to purchase a console to get your Trainer on. As for Fortnite, it’s been able to burst onto the scene in a relatively short period of time but sustain itself if those sales numbers are any indication. (And hey, Thanos was actually in the game for a bit, which basically shows that the game has arrived into pop culture.)

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So, it’s time to hop on the Battle Bus or get ready to find all your local Pokéstops … and see if you can resist joining the people who’ve spent money.