In the moment that Diablo 2 Resurrected was announced at BlizzCon 2018 in 2018, one fan stood with the makers of the free-to-play mobile game to ask: "Is this an out-of-season April Fools' joke?" This general vitriol and mockery came with Diablo 2 Resurrected up until its recent release. It's been the same since. It's no longer a reflexive reaction to disappointments or the D2R Items fact that the game is available to mobile users. This is the result of Diablo 2 Resurrected's'microtransactions', which aren't necessarily a bargain, but they weren't invented out of air.

Diablo 2 Resurrected is doused in layers of in-game transactions -- a proverbial wall of sales with exaggerated percents to convince players how much they spend, the more they save. This has been a standard practice in the mobile world for many years, however different the style of presentation might have been. You see it with Genshin Impact's Genesis Crystal store, where purchasing large amounts of currency will grant players an additional amount of exactly the same currency. You also see it in the instance of Lapis -the currency paid of Final Fantasy Brave Exvius -it entices players by offering "bonus" currencies that can reach the hundreds of thousands after purchasing packs valuing upward of $100.

"A popular tactic used by mobile games or any game that has microtransactions is to get rid of currency," an anonymous employee in the mobile game industry has recently shared his thoughts with me. "Like for instance, if I spend $1, I'd get two different currencies (gold and jewels, for example). This helps conceal the real value of the money as there's no one-to-1 conversion. And, we also purposefully place less favorable deals in front of others to make others appear more lucrative and let players feel that they're more intelligent by saving from the other deals."

"In the organization I was in, we had weekly events with exclusive prizes and they were designed to let you [...] participate with unique in-game currency that would allow you to take home one of the major prizes. However, designers had to add additional milestone prizes following the main prize, which would usually require spending real cash to make progress in the competition. Many of our milestones and measures to determine whether an event was successful is obviously how much people spent. We did measure sentiment, however, I'm convinced that the higher-ups generally cared more about whether the Diablo II Resurrected Ladder Items event made people spend."