Diablo 2 Resurrected  is doused in multiple in-game transactions- a proverbial wall of advertisements with exaggerated percents to convince players that the more they buy you, the D2R Items more money you save. This has been common practice in the mobile market for decades, regardless of how different the design may have been. This is evident with Genshin Impact's Genesis Crystal store, where buying huge amounts of currency will grant players a greater 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 -that entices players with "bonus" currency reaching into the thousands when purchasing packs of currency worth up to $100.

"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 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 Diablo 2 Resurrected Items 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.