Diablo 2 Resurrected is doused in multiple in-game

Diablo 2 Resurrected is doused in multiple in-game transactionsthat’s a wall of offers with inflated percentages to make players believe that the more they purchase you, the more money you save. This is a common practice within the mobile marketplace for years, no matter how different the D2R Items presentation may have appeared. You see it with Genshin Impact’s Genesis Crystal store, where purchasing large amounts of money will give players an additional amount of the same exact currency. The same thing happens in the case of Lapis -the currency you pay for found in Final Fantasy Brave Exvius -and entices players with “bonus” currency reaching into the thousands when purchasing packs valuing upward of $100.

“A typical strategy for mobile games or any other game that has microtransactions is to get rid of currencies,” an anonymous employee working within the mobile game industry has told me. “Like in the event that I buy $1, I’d get two currencies (gold and jewels for instance). This can help to conceal what the actual value of the cash spent since there isn’t a one-to-one conversion. Furthermore, we purposefully put worse deals [beside] other deals in order to make deals look more attractive and let players feel that they’re more intelligent by saving out and taking advantage of the other deals.”

“In the company I was in, there were weekly events featuring unique prizes and were planned so that you could […] win it using uncommon in-game currency, which allowed you to win one of the main prizes. Designers also had to include other milestone prizes on top of that first prize, and that would typically require real cash to make progress in the competition. The majority of our measurements and milestones to judge if an event did well is obviously how much people paid. We also evaluated sentiment however I’m sure the upper-levels were always more concerned about whether that event helped people spend.”

Real-money transactions aren’t new in any way by any stretch of the imagination. Diablo 2 Resurrected  didn’t pioneer them however it would be disingenuous to present that as truth. The action-RPG from Blizzard isn’t the primary of the problem, but instead is it’s the most terrible amalgamation of free mobile and PC games. With two different Battle Passes, both with distinct rewards specific to the character (and not your overall roster) and too many various currencies for the average player to track Diablo 2 Resurrected ‘s economics read like a mobile marketplace monstrosity.

Although they are sometimes encountered with resistance, have become normalized within the gaming industry in general. You could argue that the widespread use of cheap D2R Items loot containers or other real-money transactions in AAA games have led to this type of unregulated economy, but the more AAA gaming moves towards the model of games-as-a-service as it shifts to the games-as-service model, the more similarities to the mobile gaming that has been within this highly popular realm for over a decade.