"A most common strategy used in mobile games or other games using microtransactions, is to make the currencies," an anonymous employee who works within the D2R Items mobile game industry recently explained to me. "Like the case, if I were to spend $1, it could result in two kinds of currency (gold and jewels for instance). This helps 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 ones to make the other deals look more lucrative and make players believe they're smarter by saving out and taking advantage of the other deals."

"In the business I was in, there were weekly events featuring unique prizes, and they were designed to allow you to [...] participate with exclusive in-game currency that could allow you to win one of the main prizes. But the designers also had include other milestone prizes on top of the principal prize, which will normally require cash for the chance to gain an advantage in the event. Our most frequent benchmarks and indicators to gauge whether an event was successful is of course how much people paid. We also measured sentiment, however, I'm convinced that the higher-ups have always been more interested in whether that event helped people spend."

Real-time payments aren't brand new by any stretch of the imagination. Diablo 2 Resurrected didn't pioneer them but it's untrue to claim that they are a actual fact. The action-RPG from Blizzard isn't the primary reason, but rather an unbalanced mix of hundreds of free-to-play mobile as well as PC games. Two different Battle Passes, each with specific rewards that are exclusive to a character (and not to your entire roster), and too many various currencies for the average player to keep track of Diablo 2 Resurrected's economics read like a gigantic mobile marketplace.

These practices, though sometimes received with apprehension, have become normalized within the gaming industry in general. One could argue that presence of loot boxes as well as other real-money transactions in AAA games have created this type of market that is a predatory one, but the more that AAA gaming shifts towards a models of games-as services more, the more it has to do with game-based mobile apps that've been within this highly popular realm for more than a decade.

And this isn't just reflected in the use of money to obtain items however, it is also evident in gacha mechanics and disclosure of drop rates among uncommon items. Gacha is using game currency, whether it's free or purchased through an in-game shop to Diablo 2 Resurrected Items purchase something randomly: pieces of equipment, in the case of Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia, or characters in the ever-popular (and persistant) Fate/Grand Order or Genshin Impact.