The product is not the card. It is the gambling-like rush.
Past midnight, a table, scissors and an acrylic rack can pull tens of thousands of people into a livestream. The host may keep their face off camera. Packs get ripped open. Contents are flashed, put back, and followed by the bell that sends comments racing across the screen: “Congratulations, baby” and “You’re so lucky.” Then another buyer steps in, chasing the same feeling.
This is livestream card unboxing. At the cheap end, one card sells for RMB 2 or RMB 3. A desirable pull can go for RMB 30, RMB 40 or more than RMB 100, even when its production cost is just a few jiao on a printing line.
Cards were merely the first category to take off. The same setup now sells paper cards, postcards, metal badges, plastic stands, ceramic fridge magnets, plastic trinkets bought in Yiwu wholesale markets for RMB 0.30 or RMB 0.40, flimsy plastic crystal bracelets and everyday stationery such as pens and notebooks. The pattern is obvious. Most of these goods are nearly worthless by themselves.
The report’s argument is blunt: the thing being sold is not the object. It is the most exciting fragment of a gambling experience. That lets the business feel like betting without taking on gambling’s legal baggage.
IP labels, rarity and pricing can all be repackaged
Ultraman, My Little Pony or something else—the specific IP is not the point. The market covers anime, games, celebrity merchandise and culture-and-tourism collaborations. Rarity, though, has no common rulebook. Two sellers can call a card SSR while offering wildly different chances of pulling it.
Some lines do not seem to have real IP authorization. MBTI personality cards and nameless cards featuring imagery the article suspects was generated by AI still attract buyers.
The price gap is hard to miss. Livestream buyers often pay more than they would through normal retail channels. The article cites a Jujutsu Kaisen embossed badge sold in several unboxing streams for more than RMB 50 per draw. On the official channel of Japanese anime-merchandise chain Animate, the same item was visibly cheaper. Buyers are paying the stream premium for a shot at turning a small payment into a larger prize.
Prices inside these rooms stretch much further than outsiders might expect. Entry packs cost RMB 2 or RMB 3. RMB 30 and RMB 40 packs are common. Some consumers say products sold as intangible cultural heritage collaborations can cost more than RMB 100. Other RMB 30 or RMB 40 products carry a museum cultural-creative label and promise possible prizes such as bookmarks. Most buyers, however, receive only a paper “commemorative ticket” printed with elements from the museum’s collections.
The rules keep changing, but the goal stays the same
Simple pack opening has spawned a parade of formats: wishing, stacking games, handkerchief tosses, box lifting, pig grabbing, head counting, matching pairs, add-on rewards, spin wheels and revival rounds. Different props. Same target. Keep viewers around longer. Push one more order.
The “wish” format is fairly simple. Before paying, the customer names the card they want. If the host opens that exact card, the customer gets extra packs. If not, it stays a normal purchase. A random draw is dressed up as a test of whether a wish comes true, making the buyer feel they chose the target themselves.
The “stacking” game is messier—and much easier to snowball. Before every round, the room supposedly selects several characters for the prize pool at random. If a later buyer opens one of those characters, they get a large bonus. The report cites earlier media coverage of a Nezha-card version: buy one pack, hit a designated rare slot, and the seller adds a full stack of packs for free. If that stack produces the same result, another stack appears. There is no upper limit to how far it can continue.
That is the trick. A decision to buy again is made to look free. Customers are encouraged to believe they are not spending more, just receiving another costless chance.
The “spin wheel” format gets even closer to a slot machine. On a phone screen, the host displays a wheel cut into dozens of slices, taps to start, taps again to stop, and lands on different bonuses, such as two extra packs.
The formats look different. The machinery underneath is not. Each one creates a fake sense of control and suggests that viewers can somehow borrow another person’s luck for free.
The real dealing happens off camera
In Macau casinos, dozens of eyes may track the dealer’s hands. In livestream unboxing, the important dealing often takes place outside the camera frame.
The report says the model rests on an opaque chain of operations. China’s formal rules for gacha-style mobile games require publishers to disclose exact probabilities for each rarity level. Hide those odds, and regulators can demand corrections, seize illegal gains and issue fines. In livestream card rooms, changing the outcome can be much easier.
Several media investigations cited by the report describe a practice called “bag making.” Before a stream starts, valuable cards may be removed and redistributed. Sellers may use weighing tricks or card-scanning devices to locate cards. They may then treat big spenders differently from ordinary buyers. A former employee who briefly worked for a card-unboxing company put it plainly: “If we want you to win, we give you the card. If we don’t, we don’t.” When the cards are not supplied by legitimate manufacturers, the room for tampering grows even wider.
The whole game begins with one job: make people think they can win. Rules, scripts and pacing can persuade viewers that they joined at exactly the right time or cracked the host’s pattern. The report says that feeling is often engineered.
“Matching pairs” games use the same idea. A buyer wins only if their result matches another person’s color or number. One person’s outcome becomes tied to everyone else’s. A loss feels less final. Leaving gets harder.
The setup gives new viewers a reason to believe, existing players a reason to continue and unlucky buyers a reason to blame chance instead of questioning the rules.
The legal boundary is whether rewards can turn back into cash
The report calls livestream card unboxing a legal, voluntary game. It also argues that people heavily targeted by these tactics should not be brushed off as merely greedy or irrational.
Here is the report’s numerical comparison. Mainstream China Welfare Lottery games usually pay out around 50%. Compliant slot-machine products often return more than 90%. In both examples, the return is cash. Livestream card rooms have no payout-ratio ceiling. What customers receive is often a card printed for a few jiao or a few yuan, or cheap unsold goods from wholesale markets.
That is the legal dividing line. Not how aggressive the sales tactics become. Whether the money can be changed back into cash. Livestream rooms hand over physical merchandise, so the transaction is generally treated as an ordinary sale of goods. Even manipulated odds can be difficult to classify directly as casino operation.
The article contrasts this with the “Cyber Reward” case. Authorities investigated, and courts issued sentences because the model formed a money loop: recharge, lucky draw, discounted buyback, then recharge again. Once a prize can be converted back into money, the structure starts looking a lot more like a casino.
Behind it sits a rapidly growing merchandise economy
To estimate the market’s size, the article turns to what the industry calls the “guzi economy”—IP-based merchandise, with cards among its biggest categories. Citing iiMedia Research and other institutions, the report says China’s guzi economy reached RMB 168.9 billion in 2024, up 40.63% from a year earlier. Industry participants even called 2024 the first year of the guzi economy.
An industry white paper cited in the report says Gen Z dominates China’s wider ACG user base and forms the main consumer group for guzi merchandise.
From that perspective, livestream rooms are not creating a market from nothing. They are upgrading the sales channel. Capsule-toy machines and blind-draw shelves once found in offline malls have moved into a format much better at stirring emotion and pulling traffic together.
According to the article, upstream supply follows three main routes.
- The first is the formal route. Leading manufacturers secure licensed IP and earn from brand assets. Financial disclosures from related companies show that gross margins in card businesses can exceed 70%, although rising authorization fees add to costs.
- The second route copies overseas IP. One industry participant said some anime rights holders are based abroad, which makes domestic enforcement harder in practice and gives unauthorized small factories room to print their own products.
- The third route drops IP altogether. Merchants create the graphics, print the cards and set the rarity tiers themselves. MBTI cards and products with suspected AI-generated imagery belong here. The livestream room controls both design and pricing, making this the easiest version of the business to enter.
The margins may look rich, but the books are not always pretty
The gap between selling price and production cost can look enormous. The report says the actual accounts of livestream rooms may be far less attractive.
One entrepreneur shared their own numbers publicly: RMB 1 million in revenue across four months. Goods took 60% of costs, traffic acquisition 20%, labor and rent 10%, and net profit roughly 10% of revenue.
One case proves little. Still, it shows why a business that looks wildly profitable from the outside may be a poor bet for newcomers. The person on camera may not be taking the biggest cut.
Paid traffic is the second-biggest expense after inventory—and the one most likely to run wild. Competition is getting tougher. Customer-acquisition costs can climb fast, chewing through net margins that were already thin.
The sector is taking on a more corporate shape, too. Many MCNs now sit between IP-merchandise distributors and livestream hosts, handling streamer selection, traffic purchases and customer retention. Top rooms can pile up dozens of pending orders. Newcomers, meanwhile, may wait hours without receiving one order. Social platforms are filling with posts about failed card-unboxing ventures and clearance sales for leftover inventory. Given the wider state of China’s livestream e-commerce market, that split is hardly surprising.
A failed listing bet and tighter oversight are shaking the foundation
In June this year, the deadline expired for a listing-related bet tied to Kayou, described in the article as a leading company in China’s trading-card sector. Multiple financial media reports say Kayou signed an agreement with investors in 2021. It had to complete a Hong Kong IPO within five years or buy back preferred shares at an agreed rate. The amount involved was about RMB 1.35 billion. Five years have passed. The bet failed.
Kayou’s card-business gross margin was once considered higher than Pop Mart’s. Even so, it could not clear the bar for a Hong Kong listing. If the industry’s most compliant, brand-heavy company is still facing capital-market doubts, the business model has something to prove.
Regulators are paying closer attention. This year, market regulators in several places placed blind-box card unboxing in special enforcement campaigns. The Beijing Consumers Association launched a questionnaire about disorder in blind-box and card-unboxing livestreams, identifying four problems: unclear draw rules, weak checks and supervision, misleading impressions of value, and poor protection of after-sales rights. More than 60% of respondents said probability disclosures were not prominent. Nearly half said sellers deliberately overstated the odds. Dongguan and Guangzhou also issued consumer-protection notices focused on minors spending on blind boxes and trendy toys.
There was an earlier warning. In June 2025, People’s Court Daily published an article titled Analysis of Disorder in “Livestream Card Unboxing” and Governance Suggestions. It described the format as a blend of livestream commerce and the blind-box economy, with staged unboxings and hidden probabilities as the main problems.
The policy groundwork goes back to 2023. In June that year, the State Administration for Market Regulation issued the Interim Guidelines for Regulating Blind Box Business Conduct, the first dedicated rules for blind-box operations. They require sellers to disclose draw probabilities, ban arbitrary adjustments and prohibit selling blind boxes to children under 8. On July 1, 2024, the Regulation on the Implementation of the Consumer Rights Protection Law took effect. Article 14 covers online livestreams, requiring platforms to build consumer-protection systems and clear dispute-resolution procedures. That created a general basis for handling livestream-shopping disputes.
No nationwide rulebook yet, but the window is narrowing
Policy is moving toward two priorities: protecting minors and showing the odds clearly. Still, the article says China has not issued a dedicated nationwide rule aimed specifically at livestream card unboxing. For now, the sector remains in a regulatory gap.
The business does not seem to have a durable moat. It leans heavily on paid traffic. Once customer-acquisition costs rise, already-thin margins get squeezed again. Brand value is accumulated weakly, and a white-label card can lose its price anchor as soon as the novelty wears off. New game formats appear quickly. None has created a lasting barrier.
The model survives through careful design. A piece of paper costing a few jiao can recreate the most thrilling part of a gambling product while avoiding the payout rules normally attached to gambling. The report’s conclusion is plain: the business was never really about cards or merchandise. It is a machine for getting people to place one bet after another.
The piece was first published on Titanium Media App. It was written by Taikeguan Consumption and edited by Hao Jingyu.