In April of this year, a company called “Kayou” updated its prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. According to the data in the prospectus, its revenue in 2024 reached 10.057 billion yuan, with a net profit of 4.466 billion yuan, and a net profit margin of 44.4%. Among them, the profit margin of collectible card games was about seventy percent over the three years from 2022 to 2024, accounting for about 90% of the total revenue in those years. In 2024, the total gross profit reached its peak at 44.3 billion yuan (total revenue of 6.7654 billion yuan). Against the backdrop of an economic downturn, Kayou’s profit margin has reached an alarming height, which makes us curious about the source of such high profitability.
What are collectible card games? — The luxury enjoyment of parasitic classes
Kayou’s so-called collectible card games mainly fall into two categories: one is collectible cards co-branded with well-known IPs (CCG), usually featuring characters or landscapes from the IP on the cards; this is the basic form of collectible card games. The other type is based on collection but creates a set of rules for card battles, with each card having unique effects and functions, allowing players to use cards for “battles”—this is called trading card games (TCG). Usually, there are two markets for collectible card games: one is the official sales channels for card sales, such as pre-made starter decks (pre-constructed decks) and various booster packs. Booster packs are random, and players cannot directly obtain specific desired cards. Since pre-constructed decks cannot directly compete with “mainstream” players, new players have to buy various booster packs to supplement their decks. Because players cannot directly get the cards they want, trading among players (which is profitable, leading to groups dedicated to buying and selling cards) becomes an important part of collectible card games. Whether OCG or TCG, there is a ranking system for cards: higher-level cards have lower drop rates (these form the basis of many later anime-style mobile games). The price of a card is positively correlated with its drop rate: higher-level, rarer, and more powerful cards are more expensive, sometimes costing tens of thousands of yuan. Unlike typical goods, the official issuer can control the drop rate of cards. For TCGs, they can deliberately design some core or overpowered cards to control the market (though, to maintain sustainability, such overpowered cards are later restricted or banned). Even at normal booster pack prices, the prices of collectible cards are monopolistic: for example, a single booster in Yu-Gi-Oh! usually costs 8-15 yuan, with only five cards per pack, and the value far exceeds that of regular cards. The cheapest My Little Pony booster costs 2 yuan for six cards. The value of a product is determined by the necessary labor time to produce it, but how much labor does a card take? “In the Kayou super factory in Kaihua, Zhejiang, a Heidelberg printing machine worth over a hundred million yuan is printing cards at a speed of 1,300 per minute.” Clearly, the production cost of a single card is very low. The high profit margin of Kayou is mainly due to the monopoly profits gained through collectible card games and collaborations with well-known IPs.
In summary, collectible card games are a luxury that requires significant financial investment. The target audience for such cards is not the working class who lack extra money and time to buy meaningless paper and study interactions between cards. Instead, it mainly targets the petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie who have ample money and time for collection and research. However, Kayou has set its sights on a particular parasitic class—Chinese primary and secondary school students. Although the official does not explicitly admit this, the facts are persistent.
Evil lurks—The bane of China’s younger generation
It is evident that elementary students are addicted to opening packs, aiming to obtain high-level and rare cards. They pursue this because, in their view, owning a highly rare card can satisfy their desire to show off. “Who can produce a rare card can establish ‘power’ in the class and win classmates’ attention and respect.” This invisible competition affects children’s emotions and behaviors. Essentially, this is a form of fetishism, as owning a card seems to symbolize social status. Behind these rare cards also lies a social hierarchy—maintained by money. To get a highly rare card, the most direct way is through buying many booster packs or spending large sums on the secondary market (some might say luck plays a role, but high-rarity cards are often produced with different craftsmanship, and stores weigh packs to select likely high-rarity ones; also, this admiration is rooted in the recognition of monetary status; and such worship often involves envy and greed). Essentially, this worship reflects bourgeois values, believing that wealth equals power and social rank. Kayou is well aware of this and continually releases new cards and rarity levels to stimulate middle and primary school students to buy more, thus capturing huge monopolistic profits.
As mentioned earlier, collectible card games inevitably develop a secondary market for player trading (broadly speaking, since some card shops also buy and resell cards). Due to the high rarity of some cards, their prices fluctuate naturally with supply and demand, creating opportunities for profit through buying low and selling high. This speculative mentality is part of bourgeois ideology. Kayou’s issuance of collectible cards has greatly stimulated the speculative psychology of many primary and secondary students. Additionally, many adults with speculative tendencies also profit from this secondary market, spreading the game further and harming more children.
Beyond physical card trading, Kayou has further targeted the online space. They developed a card-drawing mini-program that reintroduces past limited-edition cards, attracting many to virtual card opening activities. This mini-program is not an online shop for physical cards but a virtual card opening in cyberspace, where players can choose to send or not send the card. If they choose not to send, they retain ownership of the virtual card. This evokes the earlier concept of the “metaverse,” using network technology to simulate real-world speculative activities. For those interested in speculation, virtual card opening saves time and space; they can wait until the card appreciates to a desired value before printing and selling. One player said, “This is why some people play Little Pony cards in the secondary market—early players keep their cards, and now they’re like stocks, rising in value.” For Kayou, this approach is even more advantageous because high-rarity cards require low-rarity counterparts, and this “cyber pack opening” can print only high-rarity cards, reducing costs. If a rare card has a 1 in 10,000 chance, they need to print 10,000 cards to get one, but with cyber opening, they only print high-rarity cards, which costs less. This method allows further control over the issuance of rare cards, manipulating the secondary market for profit. Behind this speculation and profit lies the extraction of surplus value created by the proletariat, monopolized by capitalists, deepening bourgeois hierarchy and speculative ideas among China’s youth.
Furthermore, the collectible card games issued by Kayou are also carriers of bourgeois ideology. Early on, they used Ultraman images to attract primary and secondary students to buy the cards. Later, they collaborated with several bourgeois cultural IPs to release related collectible cards.
Among these, the most widely spread is “Nezha 2,” which promotes Confucian ideas of loyalty between ruler and subject, filial piety, and the subservience of women, as well as spreading reactionary and pornographic content. This kind of collectible card further amplifies the influence of this reactionary film on primary and secondary students. Entering Kayou’s mini-program, one can see that the cards issued carry various anime images loaded with pornographic ideas. These cards have immersed the young generation of the Chinese nation in bourgeois reactionary art, poisoning their minds with pornographic culture intertwined with bourgeois hierarchy and speculative ideas.
In socialist China, Chairman Mao placed particular emphasis on educational revolution, as it concerns cultivating revolutionary successors and the perpetuity of the proletarian revolution. The successors must love labor and be willing to sacrifice unconditionally for collective interests. To cultivate these qualities, Mao issued important directives such as “Laborers should be educated, and intellectuals should work” and “The schooling system should be shortened, and education should be revolutionary.” However, after the capitalists and revisionists seized power, the progress of educational reform was halted, and students and intellectuals reverted to old ways. When investigating these issues, I seem to see that the future of our great motherland is being poisoned by spiritual opium from childhood, cultivating a strong desire for fame and profit, engaging in academic speculation, scheming, and wasting youth on old books and pleasures. “Students, long subjected to reactionary ideas, addicted to spiritual opium, and pursuing low-level pleasures, are filled with bourgeois vulgar culture of weirdness, decadence, and violence. Our young generation of the Chinese nation has fallen into moral decay. If this continues, Chinese society will have no pure land. The land of China will be overrun by ghosts and demons, and ultimately, the nation will perish and become extinct.” (Fenghuo Flame “The Road of Future Revolution in China”) It can be said that the emergence of Kayou is not accidental but an important manifestation of the comprehensive decay of the bourgeois imperialist regime. Economically, overproduction has become severe, forcing the industry to merge with reactionary cultural products, selling through card packs and blind boxes; ideologically, there are many toxic elements that can be used for advertising. The convergence of these two aspects has created Kayou, an extremely rotten company. However, this does not mean that the bourgeoisie is strong; instead, it sharpens class contradictions. The expansion of parasitic consumption cannot fundamentally solve the contradictions between socialized production and private capitalist ownership, but will make them more acute, as it is based on the impoverishment of the proletariat. Consequently, the contradiction between the infinite expansion of production and the people’s ability to pay will intensify, and the working masses centered on the proletariat will increasingly feel the need to overthrow the bourgeois political rule. The outbreak of revolution and the demise of capitalism are inevitable in history, and revolutionary fire will burn away these rotten cultures.