Part 26. The IP-Expansion Economy — The Habit Cycle of Games, Music, Video, and Merchandise

Core question: How can a single IP occupy several payment-habit spaces at once?

The Earlier Habit-Space: A History of Buying Merchandise

When George Lucas released Star Wars in 1977, he made an unusual deal. He accepted a lower directing fee from 20th Century Fox in exchange for retaining the film's merchandising rights. Fox agreed without much thought because a movie-merchandise market scarcely existed. Executives at the negotiating table considered the rights “almost worthless,” imagining little beyond promotional posters and a handful of souvenirs.

The year after Star Wars opened, licensed Star Wars toys from Kenner generated more than $100 million in sales, and Lucas received royalties. This was the origin of the modern entertainment-IP economy. The film did not merely become a device for selling merchandise; the two began working simultaneously. Over the following half century, cumulative Star Wars merchandise sales grew to an estimated $42 billion by 2023—far more than the films' total global box office.

The underlying payment habit already existed. Fans bought objects associated with what they loved: gear supporting an athlete, souvenirs from a favorite singer's concert, or a character-shaped eraser from a neighborhood stationery shop. These purchases formed the prototype of the IP-merchandise habit.

How has that habit expanded today? Merchandise remains, but games, video, music, theme parks, pop-up stores, apps, and streaming content now connect to it at the same time, forming a habit cycle.

Pokémon: The Circular Economy of the World's Largest IP

Pokémon is the world's largest entertainment IP, with an estimated value of roughly $120–150 billion in 2022, depending on the source—larger than Marvel, Star Wars, or Harry Potter.

Its beginning was modest: Pokémon Red and Green, released for the Nintendo Game Boy in 1996. Developed by Satoshi Tajiri (田尻智), the game's central idea was simply to catch, trade, and battle Pokémon. Trading required two Game Boys connected by a link cable, so players needed a friend. Social connection became a core mechanic.

Consider the stages that followed.

1997 — Animation: The story of Ash and Pikachu. A weekly television series turned game players into viewers.

1996 — Trading Card Game (TCG): Launched as a challenger to Magic: The Gathering, it was a separate game built around collecting and battling with Pokémon cards. By 2022, the Pokémon card market was worth approximately $10 billion. First-generation rare Charizard cards sold at auction for about $370,000. During the 2020–21 pandemic, demand exploded worldwide, creating supply shortages. Even with Nintendo running card-printing plants twenty-four hours a day, production could not keep up, and convenience-store and toy-store shelves repeatedly emptied. “Pack-opening videos” became a major YouTube trend. In 2021, YouTuber Logan Paul bought $3.7 million worth of Pokémon cards and posted an unboxing video. Its tens of millions of views intensified the investment frenzy.

1998 — Theatrical film: Mewtwo Strikes Back ranked first at the Japanese box office in its opening week, then did the same in North America the following year.

2000s — Merchandise expansion: Plush toys, stationery, clothing, food, and collaborative products generated billions of dollars in annual global merchandise sales.

2016 — Pokémon GO: This augmented-reality smartphone game received seventy-five million downloads in roughly three weeks. Nintendo's share price rose approximately 120 percent in about two weeks, adding more than $20 billion to its market capitalization. It then plummeted after Nintendo issued a notice explaining that it was not Pokémon GO's direct developer and that the game's effect on its earnings would be limited. Investors had mistakenly equated Nintendo with Pokémon GO. The event remains a frequently cited case that redefined the relationship between game IP and the stock market. Cumulative revenue reached $6.2 billion by 2022, while walking through the physical world in search of Pokémon created an entirely new habit-space.

The key to this circular economy is that each medium lands in a different payment-habit space. Buying a game, watching television, collecting cards, and paying in an app are four habits that operate for different people, at different moments, and at different price points.

Marvel's MCU: Building a Twenty-Seven-Year Payment Habit

Marvel began as a comic-book publisher in 1939 and sold comics for decades. It went bankrupt in 1996, then recovered by licensing properties for Spider-Man games and selling X-Men film rights.

In 2005, Marvel borrowed $500 million from Merrill Lynch to finance its own movies. The collateral was the rights to ten characters, including Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America. A film made with half a billion dollars borrowed by a bankrupt company became the beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

Iron Man opened in 2008 and earned $585 million worldwide.

Disney acquired Marvel for $4 billion in 2009, allowing the MCU's scale to explode.

In 2019, Avengers: Endgame earned $2.798 billion worldwide. It became the highest-grossing film in history before a rerelease of Avatar moved it to second place. The way twenty-two films accumulated from 2008's Iron Man and converged in one climax meant that Marvel had turned movies into a series subscription. Watching one made the next necessary for context; Marvel viewers had to return to the theater. The structure resembled Netflix binge-watching, except installments came months or a year apart and required a new ticket each time.

The MCU's cumulative box office from 2008 through 2022 exceeded $28 billion, combining Phases One through Four.

The MCU landed in these payment-habit spaces:

• Movie tickets: More than twenty-two films at ₩10,000–15,000 each
• Streaming (Disney+): MCU series including WandaVision, Loki, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Hawkeye, Ms. Marvel, and Secret Invasion. More than twelve series appeared in the three years from 2021 through 2023. They gave viewers a reason to keep Disney+, but also became central to the debate about oversupply
• Merchandise: Figures, clothing, stationery, and collaborations worth billions of dollars annually
• Theme parks: Marvel attractions at Disneyland and Disney World, including Avengers Campus
• Games: Licensing revenue from titles such as Marvel Snap and the Marvel's Spider-Man series
• Comics: Digital subscriptions to the source comics through Marvel Unlimited at $9.99 per month

Money flows from every space. One person need not spend in all of them; people who already possess each space's payment habit participate in their own way.

BTS IP: From Music to a Storyworld

The expansion of BTS represents one of the most highly evolved forms of Korea's entertainment-IP economy.

It began with music. But HYBE (founded in 2005) placed music at the center of its content IP and connected multiple payment-habit spaces around it.

The BTS Universe (BU) is an official storyworld with narratives hidden across music videos and social-media posts. Fans formed an active subculture devoted to interpreting and expanding it.

The storyworld landed in these payment-habit spaces:

• Albums and digital music: The basic revenue source. BTS's Map of the Soul: 7 sold approximately 3.37 million copies in its first week in Korea in 2020
• Concerts: Three Seoul shows in 2022 drew forty-five thousand in person and 2.46 million including online streaming and theatrical live viewing
• Merchandise: Concert goods and the official Weverse Shop. HYBE reported approximately ₩395.6 billion in merchandise and licensing revenue for 2022
• Fan platform (Weverse): A subscription-style fan community selling digital content, with roughly forty million monthly active users in 2023
• Mobile games: BTS WORLD (2019), developed with Netmarble, and BTS Universe Story, developed with NCSoft
• Webtoon: SAVE ME, a free Naver Webtoon based on the BTS Universe
• Pop-up stores: Offline stores in major cities worldwide combining limited merchandise with experiential exhibitions. The MONOCHROME pop-up in Seoul in 2024 had waiting times of several hours, and limited goods sold out immediately after opening
• IP licensing: Credit cards, TinyTAN character dolls, and food-and-beverage collaborations

HYBE earned ₩1.7803 trillion in 2022, with more than half coming from sources other than albums and digital music. BTS is a music group, but HYBE's business is an IP platform.

One event was especially revealing. When BTS announced in 2022 that military service would create a hiatus, HYBE's share price fell approximately 25 percent in one day—24.87 percent at the close—and about ₩2 trillion in market capitalization disappeared. It showed both that BTS was central to the entire company and that dependence on a single IP carries risk. HYBE subsequently accelerated a multi-label strategy with NewJeans, LE SSERAFIM, &TEAM, and others. For fans, meanwhile, the members' expected completion of service and full-group return in 2025–26 became a reason to wait. The fandom's survival through the hiatus is empirical proof of how a strong fandom keeps IP alive.

Pokémon Cards and Marvel Figures: The Ancient Payment Habit of Collecting

The strongest habit-space in the IP-merchandise economy is collecting.

The payment habit of collecting is thousands of years old. Gathering rare objects combines reward psychology, the desire to own, and a sense of community belonging. Stamp collecting, baseball cards, and antiques all share this psychological structure.

The pandemic explains the global Pokémon-card boom of the early 2020s. Adults working from home began taking out the cards they had loved as children. YouTubers posted pack-opening videos, stimulating FOMO—the fear of missing out.

A first-edition, first-generation Charizard sold for roughly $370,000 at auction in 2020. In July 2021, Logan Paul purchased a Pikachu Illustrator card for $5.275 million, setting a record for Pokémon cards. This is the logic of the art-auction market: scarcity, fandom, and investment value.

Hot Toys' one-sixth-scale Marvel figures cost ₩200,000 to more than ₩1 million each. Collectors approach them not as toys but as investments, keeping them unopened in expectation of appreciation. The payment habits of real estate and stocks have migrated into the figure market.

Virtual Influencers: When IP Replaces People

The most extreme form of IP expansion is the virtual influencer: a character that does not exist in the physical world but works as an influencer.

Lil Miquela (2016) is an American virtual influencer with more than three million Instagram followers. She has signed advertising deals with Prada, Calvin Klein, Samsung, and others, and generates an estimated $12 million or more annually. Though created with AI and graphic design, followers track “her” daily life and listen to “her” music.

Rozy (2021) is a Korean virtual influencer who became widely known through an advertisement for Shinhan Life. A generative-AI image designed to look like a real person, she later signed deals with LG Electronics, Hyundai Motor, and others.

The business advantages are clear: no scandals, no aging, no contract disputes, and the ability to work twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. From the perspective of operating a completed IP indefinitely, the logic resembles K-pop virtual idols such as PLAVE and ISEGYE IDOL.

One Korean virtual idol deserves particular attention. PLAVE (2023) has virtual character bodies, but the voices and performances of real human members appear directly through them. Its second mini album sold 560,000 copies in its first week in 2024, the year after its debut, and official fan-café membership passed one million within that first year. ISEGYE IDOL (2021) built a fandom through YouTube and Twitch streaming and successfully held an offline concert in 2023. The sight of an audience waving light sticks toward virtual characters onscreen revealed a new horizon for IP expansion.

Yet there is a limit to empathy. The motivation to pay can falter the moment fans register that the object of their emotions is “not a person.” One reason PLAVE succeeded is that fans know real humans are behind the members—that human voices and feelings live inside the virtual shell. This is the decisive difference from entirely AI-generated virtual influencers such as Rozy, who exists only as CGI. Generative-AI influencers can be efficient advertising models, but observations to date suggest that they struggle to form the deep fandoms in which people invest emotionally for years. The degree to which human presence can be felt inside the virtual shell determines the fandom's depth.

The External Expansion of Korean Game IP

The paths by which Korean game IP expands into other media are also developing rapidly.

Lineage (1998) is NCSoft's legendary Korean PC online game. Attempts were made to produce a drama based on the IP, and a webtoon was serialized. Yet transferring the original game's fandom to television proved difficult.

Mabinogi (2004) is Nexon's MMORPG set against Irish mythology. Its sophisticated in-game music system led to separate soundtrack albums and classical concerts. Offline events such as Mabinogi Festa turned game fans into concert audiences.

Solo Leveling (2024) is the most complete media-mix example for a Korean web-novel IP: web novel on KakaoPage → webtoon from D&C Media and KakaoPage → Japanese animation by A-1 Pictures in 2024 → global distribution through Crunchyroll → game from Netmarble. Each stage landed in a different payment-habit space: web-novel cookies → webtoon cookies and ads → animation-streaming subscription → in-app game purchases.

Special Field: The Dōjinshi and Fanfiction Economy — Payment-Spaces Made by Unofficial Fandom

The IP-expansion economy contains a distinctive space: content made by fans, rather than by official rights holders.

Comic Market, or Comiket, began in Tokyo in 1975 and became the world's largest dōjinshi event. Held twice a year, in summer and winter, at Tokyo Big Sight, it drew as many as 750,000 attendees before the pandemic and approximately thirty-five thousand circles selling work. Most dōjinshi sold there are fan creations using characters from existing games, animation, and manga.

Comiket's economic effect is estimated in the billions of yen. One event's wider impact on Tokyo's transportation, lodging, and restaurants has been estimated at approximately ¥18 billion. Yet none of this revenue goes to the original IP owners. Comiket is nonprofit, and fan works are unauthorized in principle.

Japan's major rights holders nevertheless tolerate Comiket because fan creation keeps IP alive. When fans continue creating after official content ends, even an old IP's life is extended. An IP with a living fandom always has the possibility of a reissue, remaster, or collaboration.

Korean fanfiction, fan art, and fan-YouTube culture uses the same structure. Videos, webtoons, and images made by K-pop fans supplement official IP and sustain fandoms. HYBE, SM, JYP, and YG do not explicitly crack down because the viral effect of fan creation can sometimes outperform official marketing.

The payment habit in the fan-creation economy is unusual: fans pay directly for fan works. At Comiket, fan artists sell dōjinshi for ¥500–1,500 each. A circle may sell tens or hundreds of copies in a day, while popular circles sell out immediately after opening. Buyers know the products are unofficial. Idol fans buy fan artists' goods and support fanfiction writers; some fandom segments respond more strongly to fan IP than to the original.

Korea holds similar events. Comic World, the country's largest fan-creation convention, takes place four times a year. Its scale and format are smaller than Comiket's, but it follows the same structure of trading fan works based on K-pop, webtoon, and game IP. Comic Corner, Seoul Comics, and other domestic events also make up the fan-creation economy.

Failure Patterns in IP Expansion

IP expansion does not always succeed. Its failure patterns are equally clear.

Failed spin-offs: Forced expansion can alienate even the original fandom. Star Wars experienced fan division while trying to follow the MCU's path. Excessive production of Disney+ series also drove full-fledged discussion of Marvel Fatigue after 2022. The opening-weekend box office for many MCU films released between 2021 and 2023 fell below the pre-Endgame phase average. If Endgame was the culmination of a twenty-two-film narrative, later works needed to build toward a new summit. Instead, emotional exhaustion and content oversupply converged.

Damage to the original: Transferring an IP to another medium can strip away its central appeal. Netflix's 2021 live-action Cowboy Bebop ended after one season amid harsh fan reviews. Fans of the original animation did not become subscribers for the adaptation.

Failed game adaptations: Films based on video games have generally performed poorly throughout cinema history. Super Mario Bros. (1993), Street Fighter (1994), and Dungeons & Dragons (2000) are representative failures. By contrast, Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) succeeded after intense pre-release criticism led the studio to redesign the character and remake the film. It demonstrated that fandom feedback can correct the direction of IP expansion.

Hint Points

What are the core patterns of the IP-expansion economy?

First, IP expansion is a transfer into existing payment-habit spaces. Pokémon could enter the card-collecting market because baseball cards and stamp collecting had already created the space. Marvel could enter theme parks because the payment habit of visiting theme parks already existed. IP expansion does not create a new habit; it lands IP in an existing habit-space.

Second, fandom is the resource that powers expansion. The larger the fandom, the more payment-habit spaces an IP can enter. Even if the entire BTS fandom does not play games, game companies still want the BTS license because some gamers are BTS fans.

Third, excessive expansion dilutes the original. As the MCU and Star Wars show, expanding too rapidly into too many spaces exhausts the fandom. Once “specialness” disappears, the motivation to pay also weakens.

Can I draw three IP-expansion scenarios for my content? Which existing payment-habit space would each enter, and who has already preempted that space?

Pokémon began with games and expanded into cards, animation, and apps. Every expansion, however, had one thing in common: the feeling of “liking Pokémon.” Fandom came first, not the payment habit. An IP-expansion strategy without fandom is an empty shell.

Kim Dongeun · WhtDrgon@MEJE.kr · 2026