The Money Machine of Gaming and a Lesson for Sports Business

Title: The Money Machine of Gaming and a Lesson for Sports Business

One evening in Beijing, I sat beside a young friend who works as a graphic designer. He opened his phone, stared at a frame that would vanish within hours, and said: "I saved for three weeks just to wait for this." Instantly, another image flashed into my mind. In 2026, on the Kazan stands, a group of Iranian women had disguised themselves as men to enter the stadium, whispering to me that they were banned from watching football at home. They too had saved, too had waited, and had staked their faith on one limited moment.

Two strangers, two platforms that seem to have nothing to do with each other. Yet both run on the same mechanism: faith is packaged into a window of time, and that window will certainly close. "On the World Cup stands, I learned to listen to the applause of belief." And the more I listened, the more I realized that this applause — whether it rings out on a pitch or emits from a phone screen — is being designed by extraordinarily gifted architects of revenue.

The specific story I want to dissect today comes from an open-world role-playing game by HoYoverse. In recent weeks, the player community has been buzzing about the schedule of "banners" — limited windows in which players spend premium in-game currency for a chance to obtain new characters or weapons. Each version of the game is split into two phases of roughly 21 days. The first phase of the next version is said to introduce two new characters at once; the second phase is likely to bring back older characters.

What is striking is not the names of the characters. What is striking is that most of the information about this schedule has no verifiable source. Only a single data point comes from the publisher's official announcement channel. Of twenty-eight information points in total, as many as twenty carry no source, and three are the author's own opinion. Many of the character names and version numbers cited cannot even be cross-checked against the game's public state. The original article itself concedes that the exact banner schedule remains to be confirmed.

I am not writing this to spread rumors. I am writing because behind that "upcoming schedule" veneer lies a revenue machine worth studying seriously by the sports industry. And because, as I will show, the way this machine operates is both a lesson and a warning.

Let us begin with the mechanism known as "pity." In the gacha system, a player is guaranteed a five-star character — the rarest tier — within a maximum of 90 "pulls." If the first five-star is not the promoted character, the next five-star is certain to be that character. The community calls this "50/50": half a chance to win immediately, half a chance to wait one more round but be compensated with certainty.

On the surface, this looks like a kind design, because it places a ceiling on bad luck. But looked at more closely, it is a masterpiece of expectation management. The 90-pull ceiling is not kindness; it is a psychological anchor: it turns a gambling-like act into an investment that can be calculated, and it is precisely that calculability that emboldens people to spend more. When you believe you are certain to get what you want, the spending limit dissolves by itself.

The second mechanism is "shared pity." Accumulated pulls carry over between banners of the same type. That means when one banner closes and another opens, players do not lose the progress they have built up. Psychologically, this nearly erases the sense of loss from abandoning a banner — and thus increases the frequency of spending.

The third mechanism, and perhaps the one most worth learning from, is a rerun policy with no fixed schedule. Some characters vanish for over a year; others return after only a few versions. No timetable is made public. This uncertainty creates the feeling that this time might be the last chance — the fear of missing out, or FOMO. This is not laziness in scheduling. It is a design decision.

Here I want to borrow a line I once wrote: "Every transfer deal is a silent farewell and an unannounced welcome." A football transfer window and a character rerun in a game follow the same logic: both are windows of time that generate expectation, and both force fans to decide amid uncertainty.

Finally there is "Chronicled Wish" — a separate banner type for veteran characters. It resembles a secondary revenue stream: it lets the publisher re-monetize characters that have long slept, without disrupting the rhythm of the main banners. Put these four pieces together — pity, shared pity, uncertain reruns, and a secondary revenue stream — and you see an almost perfect revenue machine: direct, recurring, and controlled in supply and information by a single actor.

This is where I want to stop and argue against myself.

It is easy for the sports industry to look at this machine and exclaim that we must follow suit. Before every season, clubs sell season tickets; leagues sell broadcast rights; brands sell limited-edition jerseys. In essence, all are limited windows and attractive on-sale periods. But there is one core difference we must not forget.

In the gacha model, the publisher is simultaneously the player, the referee, and the ticket seller. It sets the probability rules, it publishes those rules, and it is the sole beneficiary. No independent arbitration mechanism verifies that the disclosed rates are true. This is a degree of concentrated power far higher than in any sports ecosystem, where the rule-maker, the organizer, and the beneficiary are at least separate entities.

"Wang Shuang's tactics are not a blueprint, but a whisper passed through every ball." I often think of that line when comparing the two worlds. In women's football, a player's value is verified by what happens on the pitch, before tens of thousands of spectators and millions watching replays. In the gacha model, a character's value is decided by the seller alone, and the only verification comes from internal data that no one outside can see.

In other words, FOMO in sports is fed by real scarcity: limited tickets, limited stadium capacity, a limited player career. FOMO in gacha is fed by artificial scarcity: an uncertain schedule drawn up by the seller himself. Both are equally effective at generating revenue. But only one of them faces public judgment transparently.

"In esports, I found the heartbeat of a generation that does not need a pitch but still needs the game." And precisely because of that, I believe the boundary between traditional sports and the digital world is not a wall, but a mirror.

Looking into the gacha machine, the sports industry can learn how to design recurring experience windows, how to turn passive fans into frequent participants, and how to nurture a community that knows how to wait instead of buying once and leaving. But it must also see the other side of the mirror: when the right to set rules, the right to sell, and the right to profit rest in the same pair of hands, the public's trust becomes the only asset — and the most fragile one.

The question I leave behind is not whether sports should imitate gacha. The question is: when we redesign how we sell belief, are we willing to let others audit our own price list?