The Gacha Machine and the Economy Without a Stadium: When the Publisher Sits at Both Ends of the Table

In the official documentation of an open-world role-playing game operated by HoYoverse, there is a clause written in technical language but carrying the weight of a vow: players are guaranteed to receive a five-star character within 90 pulls. If the first five-star pull lands on a standard character instead of the banner's featured character, the next five-star pull is guaranteed to be the featured character. No exceptions. No gray areas.

I read that clause three times on a winter evening in Seoul, snow falling outside my window while my computer held two windows open side by side: one with the official documentation, one with a banner-history tracker I had built myself over many months. Eighteen years covering esports, I have witnessed countless contracts, release clauses, and promises exchanged between clubs and players. But I had never seen a promise enforced with such numerical precision — and verified publicly by the very party that made it.

That is why I decided to sit down with Genshin Impact's gacha system. Not as a player weighing whether to spend money, but as a journalist trying to understand how a monetization machine actually operates. The more I read, the more I realized this is a world entirely different from esports — not because it is novel, but because it is self-enclosed in a way that an esports ecosystem can never be.

A "season" measured in banners, not in matches

Esports has a match schedule. Gacha has a banner schedule. The two sound similar, but their nature differs by an ocean. In esports, a season is shaped by tournaments, qualifiers, and head-to-head contests whose outcomes no one can predict. In gacha, the cycle is shaped by content versions — each version split into two phases, each phase lasting roughly 21 days, each phase carrying one or more banners.

From official announcements and community sources, version 7.0 entered its second phase with rerun banners for Flins and Ineffa. In phase one of version 7.1, two new characters, Vesna and Vodyanitsa, were introduced simultaneously. In phase two of 7.1, the stage returned to reruns, including Skirk and Escoffier. One caveat must be stated immediately: the exact schedule of this phase is still awaiting official confirmation, and I will not write as though it is settled.

What is worth noting is the structure. When two new characters appear in the same phase, currency-allocation pressure in the game — what the community calls "primogems" — peaks precisely in that phase. Conversely, the rerun phase functions as a strategic pause: players who spent everything in phase one must weigh their choices carefully, while players who held back get a chance to fill out their roster with characters they missed.

This is a revenue architecture, not a competitive architecture. And I must be blunt: throughout the analysis, I found no element that belongs to esports in the proper sense. No professional tournaments. No teams. No coaches. No transfer market. No competitive balance patches. Genshin Impact is a PvE role-playing game, where "versions" are content drops, not skill-balance updates. Calling it esports is a misclassification, and I will not invoke my profession to paint similarities that do not exist.

The heart of the machine: pity, 50/50, and a promise written in algorithms

Let us start with the core mechanism. Genshin Impact's gacha operates on two pillars: the pity threshold and the 50/50 system.

The pity threshold — known as pity — stipulates that players are guaranteed a five-star character within 90 pulls. This is a soft floor, because in practice the five-star rate rises as the pull count approaches 90, but contractually, the number 90 is an absolute commitment. In my world, that is equivalent to a contract clause stating a player is guaranteed an official start if the club plays enough matches — a commitment no club would dare sign, because sporting outcomes depend on too many variables.

The 50/50 system is more intricate. On a featured-character banner, the first five-star pull has a 50% chance of landing on the featured character and a 50% chance of landing on a standard character. If the result is a standard character, the next five-star is guaranteed to be the featured one. In other words, the publisher sells players a wager with a predetermined floor on losses. Players know the odds, know the maximum damage, and know the conditions for winning.

As a journalist who has covered contract scandals in the sports world, I find this architecture worthy of sitting with. It optimizes two things at once: a sense of accessibility and revenue variance. Players stay because they believe there is always a way out — however unlucky, a pity threshold waits ahead. The publisher benefits from that very controlled uncertainty: a small share of players landing on the unlucky 50/50 branch must pull again, raising total spend without raising the sticker price.

One more technical detail I consider a design highlight: pity is shared across banners of the same type. That means your pull count on one banner carries over when you switch to a banner in the same category, lowering the marginal cost of switching targets within the same category. This is a revenue-smoothing mechanism — it discourages abandoning a banner entirely, encouraging movement between targets, and by doing so keeps money flowing through both debut and rerun windows.

I once heard a businessman say: "The best design is the one that makes customers feel in control, while in reality you are the one in control." Genshin's pity machine is a near-perfect embodiment of that sentence.

Scarcity by design: when there is no fixed rerun schedule

What caught my attention most was what was left unwritten. There is no fixed rerun schedule for characters in Genshin Impact. Some characters vanish from the banner system for over a year, while others return within a few versions.

This is a deliberate scarcity mechanism — what marketing calls FOMO, the fear of missing out. In esports, scarcity comes from the match schedule: a final happens once, and if you miss it, there is no second chance. In gacha, scarcity comes from the rerun schedule: you do not know when the character you want will return, so you must decide to spend now or accept the risk of an indefinite wait.

But the machine does not stop at scarcity. It also has a second lane for old characters: the Chronicled Wish, a separate banner type with its own rule set. Its existence lets the publisher re-monetize characters who have gone dormant without returning them to the primary banners and diluting the debut cadence. This is a smart business move: separating old money from new money so each lane has its own rhythm and psychological price point.

I remember a football coach once told me the transfer market is really a legalized casino — you pay for a player based on the belief he will shine, and sometimes you buy a rotten contract. But there, you can evaluate by video, by metrics, by trial sessions. Here, what you buy is a pre-quantified probability, and what you receive is a character that cannot break down, cannot get injured, cannot demand a raise. The publisher has removed every human variable from the equation.

A counter-intuitive view: this promise is not like a sports promise

When I told several esports colleagues about this system, the common reaction was: "Sounds like opening skins in a shooter." I understand why they think so. But it is a systematic misunderstanding, and I need to dismantle it.

First, in esports, money flows through three main channels: sponsorship, broadcast rights, and content-revenue sharing. Those who pay — sponsors, broadcasters, ticket-buying fans — are not the ones directly receiving the competition results. In gacha, the payer and the recipient are the same person: the player. No stadium, no sponsors, no third party. This is a closed loop between publisher and player.

Second, in esports, power is dispersed: the publisher writes game rules, the organizer runs the event, teams manage players, regulators oversee the whole. A scandal can be exposed by any link in that chain. In gacha, the publisher is simultaneously rule-maker, operator, probability-discloser, and sole beneficiary. No independent arbiter verifies whether the disclosed odds match the actual algorithm. This is a higher concentration of power than any esports ecosystem I have witnessed.

Third, and perhaps the deepest difference: esports is born of uncertainty. No one knows in advance which team will win, and that very uncertainty creates value. Gacha is born of controlled uncertainty — the publisher does not need an open outcome, it needs a stable probability distribution so revenue can be forecast. In esports, surprise is the product. In gacha, surprise is the tool.

I do not write about what audiences see, I write about what they never get to see. And what they do not see here is an economy that needs no stadium, no season, no trophy. Only a spin and a pity threshold.

When the publisher writes the rules and collects the money

There is a legal dimension I must address, even though it was not in the original piece. The pity mechanism and the 50/50 odds I analyzed above mirror the probability-transparency requirements many markets have enacted to protect consumers, especially underage players. The publisher disclosing odds is a positive signal. But the absence of an independent body verifying those numbers is a gap.

In the sports world, when a referee errs, there is VAR, there is appeal, there is a disciplinary committee. In the gacha world, when an odds figure is suspected of being wrong, players have one choice: trust or leave. This is why I believe the gacha story is not merely a business story, but a governance story.

A contract has its own heartbeat, and I only stand and listen before it touches the ground. And the heartbeat of this gacha contract is suspiciously steady — it does not flutter before upheaval, does not skip before crisis, because it was designed never to have to skip.

Numbers that refuse to stand still

Before closing, I must address source quality. During compilation, most information points about the future schedule came without verifiable sourcing. Only one point rested on an official publisher announcement. Many character names and version numbers circulating in the community — including Odette, Flins, Ineffa, Vesna, Vodyanitsa — cannot be cross-checked against the game state known at the time of writing. This is a warning any journalist must issue: the content may be speculation, unverified rumor, or the output of automated text tools.

I say this not to sink the piece, but to keep faith. In my profession, a number that cannot stand on the scale drags down the entire article. And a schedule written on unverified sources will make readers make financial decisions on sand.

The locker room is where I learned to be silent. But silence is to hear everything, not to avoid a verdict. When the data is insufficient, I say it is insufficient — instead of filling the gap with inference.

What remains after the lights go out

If there is one lesson I want to carry from the gacha world back to esports, it is a lesson about clarity. The gacha machine works because it dares to state its numbers plainly: 90 pulls, 50/50, guarantee. Players enter the wager fully informed of the price. Meanwhile, our esports industry still has far too many things written in disappearing ink: contracts with unclear terms, delayed prize payments, promises about a young player's future that no one stands behind.

A promise written in algorithms may be cold, but at least it is honest in its own way. What esports needs is not to copy how gacha makes money, but to copy its transparency — so that players, competitors, and fans all know exactly what they are betting on.

The question I leave for those of us in this profession: when a publisher can write the rules, run the operation, publish the results, and collect the money all at once — who will be the first to speak up if something goes wrong? If the answer is "no one," then we are building an economy without a referee. And in any sport, even a sport without a stadium, a game without a referee will eventually lose its credibility.