The Gacha Machine and the Payment-Structure Game Esports Has Yet to Learn

Last week, in a small café in Beijing, a young colleague pushed his phone screen toward me. On it were a countdown, a few numbers about "pulls," and a list of character names arranged in two columns. He asked me — someone who spends his days dissecting the payment structures of transfer deals — a question I've heard no fewer than a hundred times in my life: "Should I spend now, or save for the next version?"

I looked at the screen, and the first thing I saw wasn't a game. I saw a miniature transfer window. He was weighing whether to spend on a character returning to the banner, or to wait for a brand-new one in the next version. The psychology matches exactly that of a coach facing a choice: buy a proven player in the winter window, or save the budget for a promising rookie in the summer.

That question goes beyond the scope of a game. It's a question about cash flow.

Genshin Impact, the title behind this story, is usually called an entertainment product. But beneath that cartoon shell is one of the most sophisticated payment machines the digital entertainment industry has ever built. And I believe anyone who analyzes sports — whether football or esports — should look at it at least once.

The context of a machine with no stadium

Genshin Impact is published by HoYoverse — formerly miHoYo, headquartered in Shanghai. It's an open-world role-playing game, played solo or co-op. It has no professional tournament circuit, no club system, no player transfer market. To put it plainly: it stands outside every esports concept. When some content operations label it "esports," that's a misclassification, and the misclassification has consequences — analysts will unknowingly apply frameworks that don't exist to a fundamentally different business model.

The game runs on a "version" cycle. Each version splits into two phases, each lasting about 21 days. In each phase, the publisher opens one or more banners — gacha pools — where players exchange real money for in-game currency to pull characters or weapons. According to HoYoverse's official announcement, phase one of version 7.1 is expected to introduce two new characters, while phase two is mostly reruns of older ones. Version 7.0 phase two is said to bring back familiar names like Skirk and Escoffier.

In Vietnam, players access the game through global servers, and the "save for the next version" narrative has become a kind of community language. But one thing must be said up front about the reliability of the information: most of the facts about the 7.1 banner schedule I came across carried no source. Of 28 information points, 20 were marked "no source," only one cited an official announcement, and three were the writer's personal opinion. That document openly admits: the exact banner schedule is still unconfirmed. That's an honest signal, but also a warning.

What's notable is that the 21-day cycle isn't a random number. It's short enough to create a sense of urgency, long enough for players to accumulate free currency and start feeling the pinch. It's a designed rhythm, not a natural one.

The soul lives in the payment structure

Here I want to pause on the genuinely valuable part: payment design. The payment structure is where the soul of a deal resides. And this gacha machine is really a deal packaged as a game.

The pity system — the guarantee threshold — states that a player is guaranteed a five-star character within a maximum of 90 pulls. It sounds simple, but inside it is a two-tier architecture. Tier one: when the first five-star drops on a limited banner, the chance it's the advertised character is only 50%. Tier two: if that pull yields a standard-pool character — not the advertised one — then the next five-star is guaranteed to be the advertised one. Insiders call it "50/50 and guarantee."

If you've followed football transfer contracts, the parallel is immediate. A big deal has a fixed fee, add-ons, and conditional clauses. Here, the fixed fee is 90 pulls — the maximum guarantee threshold. The 50/50 is the variable clause: a player can pay in full and still not be sure of getting what they want, forcing more pulls. That's variance design meant to maximize revenue, cleverly masked under a feeling of "almost there."

The subtler point lies in a detail the document states clearly: the pity threshold is shared across banners of the same type. Pulls accumulated on one banner still count toward another. From an economics standpoint, this lowers the marginal cost of switching between banners — and when switching cost falls, spending frequency rises. In football, no one lets you carry a deposit from an old deal over to a new one. Here, the publisher deliberately does the opposite, and that's a calculated business decision.

Then comes the rerun policy. The publisher doesn't publish a fixed rerun schedule. Some characters are absent for over a year; others return after just a few versions. This is controlled scarcity — no different from a club concealing when it will sell its star to drive the price up, except that here the price is set by buyer emotion, not by competing bidders. And there's a secondary revenue lane called Chronicled Wish, reserved for older characters, letting the publisher re-monetize assets thought to be dormant without disrupting the rhythm of the primary banners.

What's notable is that this model differs fundamentally from how esports earns from in-game cosmetics. Skins, effects, or loot boxes in esports titles usually sell players something known in advance: you know what you're buying, and you pay exactly that price. Gacha sells you a probability. Psychologically, these are two completely different products: one sells an item, the other sells a moment of suspense. And the latter is usually far more expensive.

Looking at this, I realized something our sports industry has missed. FFP didn't save football — the people willing to sit down when everything collapsed did. Football and esports build revenue on three legs: sponsorship, broadcast rights, and prize money. All three depend on third parties, on the calendar, on the health of the economy. The gacha model is a self-contained loop: the publisher sells directly to players, with no stadium, no sponsorship contract, no rights negotiation. It's immune to calendar shocks. But the price of that immunity is exposure to a different risk — legal and regulatory risk.

The blind spot of a machine that writes its own rules

This is where I want to push back on how this story is told.

The whole machine runs on one premise: the publisher is rule-maker, sole beneficiary, and information authority all at once. There's no independent referee. No agency verifies the probabilities. No one arbitrates when doubts arise. In football, that's a structure with a federation, a sports court, third-party auditors. Here, everything sits under one roof. When power is that concentrated, every number about probability, guarantee thresholds, or shared pity is only as credible as players are forced to believe.

But the second blind spot is more serious, and it belongs to us — the reporters. The source document I read had 20 of 28 information points without a source, and several character names and version numbers couldn't be checked against the game's official state. Dehumanization begins with how we name a person with data — but here there's a paradox: we're dehumanizing with fake data. A piece stuffed with character names, pull counts, and timestamps, yet lacking sources, is more dangerous than an empty one. It creates a false sense of certainty, and that certainty spreads to even the most serious readers.

I ask myself: if this were a transfer deal, would I dare publish it? The answer is no. I once made exactly that mistake. In 2026, at 25, working as an assistant editor, I rushed to state that Paulinho's entire release fee was paid in one lump, when in reality it was split into three installments with appearance clauses. A colleague caught the error, forced a correction, and I spent the following month reviewing every press-conference tape. Since then, I never write a transfer story from a single source.

Who will hold the pen when the machine needs a rulebook

The transfer market is a broken mirror; stare into it long enough and you'll see yourself. The gacha machine — with its guaranteed thresholds, its 50/50, its uncertain rerun schedule — isn't a strange phenomenon. It's a purified version of everything football and esports try to imitate: a system that sells hope directly to fans, with no intermediary, no pitch.

The problem isn't that the model makes money well. The problem is that no one has sat down to write its rules yet. When our sports industry talks about sustainability, perhaps we should start with a harder question: who will hold the pen when this machine needs a rulebook — and are we prepared to do that work before it forces us to.