As Diablo 2 Resurrected was announced at BlizzCon 2018, one member of the audience stood with the makers of the mobile game that is free to play to ask: "Is this an out-of-season April Fools' joke?" This kind of mockery and D2R Items vitriol ensued from Diablo 2 Resurrected up until its recent release. And these sentiments haven't diminished since. However, it's not the instinctive reaction to announcements that disappoint, or the fact that Diablo 2 Resurrected is now available via mobile platforms. It's the result from Diablo 2 Resurrected's'microtransactions', which aren't necessarily a bargain, but they weren't generated out of air.

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 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 Diablo 2 Resurrected Items interested in whether that event helped people spend."