"In my company that I worked in, there were weekly events with unique prizes and were created to let you [...] win it using unique in-game currency that would enable you to win one of the prizes. However, designers had to include extra milestone prizes after the major prize, which typically require real cash to make progress in the competition. A lot of our D2R Items milestones and measures to determine the success of an event is the amount individuals spent. We did track sentiment, however, I'm convinced that the higher-ups were always more concerned about whether the event enticed people to spend."

Real-time transactions don't have a new look in any way by any stretch of the imagination. Diablo 2 Resurrected didn't pioneer them but it's not honest to state that as actual fact. This action-RPG by Blizzard isn't really the primary reason, but rather the worst amalgamation of hundreds of free-to-play mobile and PC games. Two different Battle Passes each with unique rewards only available to characters (and not the entire roster), and too many different currencies for the average player to keep track of Diablo 2 Resurrected's financial system reads like a giant mobile market.

The practices, even if they're faced with opposition are now commonplace within the overall industry. You could argue that the presence of loot boxes as well as other real-money transactions in AAA games have contributed to this kind of precarious economy. However, the more AAA gaming shifts towards a game-as-a-service model is the more it has similarities with portable games which have been within this highly popular realm for more than a decade.

And this isn't just apparent in the usage of currency that is paid to purchase items as well as gacha mechanics as well as in the disclosure of drop rates among more rare items. Gacha is the practice of using in-game currency, whether it's free or acquired from an in-game shop to buy something random like pieces of equipment in the case of Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia, or characters in the ever-popular (and ever-lasting) Fate/Grand Order or Genshin Impact.

In Diablo 2 Resurrected's case, they use Legendary Crests (which can be bought or earned) to increase the chances of finding a gem with a 5 star rating in the dungeons and dungeons endgame. While it's not exactly conventional in its design (most gacha are performed through "rolling" on a time-limited banner) gamers are playing with randomness in a similar manner. In many ways this is how players are engaging in the same way. Diablo game has been building towards these kinds of mechanics since its beginnings, according to a piece Maddy Myers wrote a few weeks back.

Diablo 2 Resurrected also, in clear terms, draws directly from the "feeding" mechanic that Japanese, Korean, and Chinese mobile games have normalized for more than a decade. "Feeding" involves increasing the attributes, stats, or rarity of an item through making duplicates of a drop. These duplicates then are fed to an item with the same rarity to increase the overall stats of said item. In general there are five copies as the industry norm to max the character or item.

My first introduction to "feeding" was Fate/Grand Order, which was initially released on Japan in July of 2015. It made a profit of $4 billion dollars across the globe in 2019. In order to ensure that a character is the very best possible I needed duplicates of every character. If a certain banner came along, I ended up dropping more than 300 euros for the character that I had been looking for since a long time. However, I never obtained the copies I needed for this character's full potential. The rates for the top five-star characters averaged at around 1percent, it's no surprise that I didn't manage to acquire a replica of the character in my time using the game (which I've since uninstalled). As of the end of July, 2021 Fate/Grand Order was the seventh highest grossing mobile game the past, and D2R Ladder Items was placed after Konami's Puzzle and Dragons. The latter is, as I mentioned, is also a gacha game.