I started keeping the spreadsheet by accident. In early 2022 I walked into a pachinko hall in Shibuya to meet a friend and realized I recognized roughly half the IP on the cabinets. Evangelion. Lupin the Third. Saint Seiya. One Piece. That afternoon I went home and started a list. Three years later the list has 340 entries.
This is not a piece arguing that anime should not be in pachinko. It is a piece about what the spreadsheet actually shows when you look at it long enough. Some of what I expected was right. Some was very wrong.
What I expected
Going in I expected:
The biggest crossovers would be old IP — series whose original creative teams had moved on, where the rights holders had no reason to refuse a licensing deal.
The licensing money would mostly go to the production committees, not the original creators.
The visual treatment would be cynical — anime art lifted with minimal care into gambling product.
The crossover would be concentrated in pachinko and slots and would barely touch newer formats like mobile gacha or social casino.
I expected the whole picture to confirm what most anime fans assume: that the iGaming crossover is parasitic on creative work, structurally exploitative, and not really anything to do with what makes anime worth caring about.
What the data actually showed
The 340 entries broke down differently than I expected.
About sixty percent involved IP older than fifteen years. That much was right. But the remaining forty percent involved series still in active production or with active sequels. That surprised me.
The licensing structures were more varied than I expected. Some deals went through production committees. Some went through individual rights holders inside the committee. A few went through original creators directly when those creators retained certain rights. The picture was messier than the simple committee-takes-everything story.
The visual treatment varied dramatically. Some cabinets and apps used original key art with care, in some cases commissioning new illustrations from the original studios. Others used IP in ways the original artists would not have recognized. Predicting which was which from outside was difficult.
The format split surprised me most. Pachinko and slots represented just under half. Mobile gacha-style games and social casino represented thirty percent. Online casino skins represented the rest. The crossover was not concentrated in old-format hardware. It was spreading.
What the licensing chain actually looks like
I spent significant time trying to understand specific licensing deals. The answers were complicated.
For a typical pachinko-slot collaboration on a major anime IP, the chain often involved: the original manga publisher, the production committee for the anime adaptation, the studio that produced the animation, individual creators who retained merchandising rights, and the pachinko manufacturer. Money distributed across all of them, in proportions that varied by contract.
For mobile gacha-style games using anime IP, the chain was sometimes simpler — direct licensing from one rights holder to one developer — but the amounts involved were larger because mobile games scale differently than pachinko cabinets.
I cannot name specific contract amounts because the contracts are confidential. What I can say is that for several major series the licensing income from gambling-adjacent products represents a meaningful percentage of total IP revenue. Not the largest revenue stream. But not a rounding error either.
What this tells us about the industry
What the 340 entries actually show is an anime industry that is more financially dependent on adjacent gambling and gacha categories than fans typically acknowledge. Not catastrophically dependent. But meaningfully so.
This is not a moral judgment. It is a structural observation. If you remove pachinko licensing from the budget projections of certain mid-tier production committees, certain anime would be harder to finance. That is the actual situation, not a hypothetical.
I find this uncomfortable for the same reasons most fans would find it uncomfortable. I have not stopped finding it uncomfortable. But pretending the relationship does not exist or is shrinking is not honest. It is growing, not shrinking.
What I think this means for fans
I think the right response from fans is not boycott and not approval. It is more honest engagement with the actual financial structure of an industry whose creative output we love.
That means accepting that the anime we watch is partially financed by adjacent products we may not personally use or endorse. It means understanding that production committees exist for specific structural reasons. It means recognizing that the alternative to imperfect financing is often no anime at all.
It also means being willing to criticize specific instances when the licensing is poorly handled. Some crossovers are done with care. Others are done badly. Knowing the difference matters.
I will keep updating the spreadsheet. The next three years will tell us whether the crossover is stabilizing, growing, or finally shrinking under regulatory pressure. I do not know which. The data so far suggests growth.
