‘Gundam’ Sales Boom Thanks To ‘GquuuuuX’, Overtakes ‘Dragon Ball’ And ‘One Piece’ As Bandai Namco’s Best-Selling IP
It seems that the worries over younger audiences’ lack of interest in mecha anime were thankfully unfounded, as Bandai Namco has confirmed that the genre-revolutionizing Mobile Suit Gundam series is not only alive and well, but outright thriving to the point of overtaking both Dragon Ball and One Piece as the company’s best-selling IP.
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Per the company’s latest earnings reports, as released on November 7th and covering their performance from April – September 2025, said period saw the Mobile Suit Gundam brand generate a total of ¥127.2 billion JPY (~$824 million USD) in overall sales.
Parsed out, Bandai Namco’s sales numbers show that roughly ¥49.3 billion ($319.2 million) of that came from the franchise’s toy and hobby products, including video games, Gunpla model kits, and the newly released Gundam Card Game TCG, and the rest from various channels like licensing fees and royalties.
Notably, this total is nearly double that of last year, when in the same time frame the franchise pulled in a still respectable $76.5 billion (~$500 million).
And far from just a narrow first-place finish, the mecha series’ totals were almost double those of its two-closest competitors: One Piece, which came in second with ¥48.2 billion ($312.2 million) toy and hobby sales / ¥69.5 billion ($450.2 million) total, and Dragon Ball, which placed third with ¥13.6 billion ($421.5 million) toy and hobby sales / ¥65.1billion ($421.5 million) total.
So explosive was Mobile Suit Gundam‘s recent sales success that Bandai Namco’s Board of Directors has since increased its companywide net sales projections for the entire 2026 fiscal year from ¥1.2 trillion (~$7.7 billion) to ¥1.25 trillion (~$9 billion).
As to the reasons behind this popularity boom, the company specifically attributed it to their ability to synergyize “the buzz created from the latest video work Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX and the GUNDAM NEXT FUTURE PAVILION exhibition at the Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, and the Gundam series related products and services.”
As noted above, this news should come as welcome relief to the many anime fans and creators who feared that Mobile Suit Gundam was falling out of favor with the general public – especially GQuuuuuuX director Kazuya, who openly expressed such concerns during an August interview with Yahoo! Japan:
“When I was a child, motorcycles and cars were objects of admiration. In that vein, I think there was the idea of ‘pilotable robots’, which served as tools that could allow one to surpass adults, as if leaping straight into adulthood. However, I think the current younger generation doesn’t need that.
“Even in today’s manga and anime, the protagonists wield superpowers that surpass adults more intuitively through magic or psychic abilities. In games, you can freely control characters on the screen using a controller. Maybe that’s enough for them.
“I wonder if they even understand what it means to ‘pilot a robot’. The generation that once aspired to motorcycles and cars is still barely active, but in another 10 years, the Gundam series might not survive. While creating the Evangelion [Rebuild] series, I once again felt the need to update the meaning of robots.”
