As Diablo Immortal was announced at BlizzCon 2018, a lone participant in the crowd stood before the designers of the free-to-play mobile game to question: "Is this an out-of-season April Fools' joke?" A general sense of vitriol and D2R Items ridicule ensued from Diablo Immortal up until its recent launch. These sentiments haven't changed since. But this isn't the knee-jerk reaction to disappointing announcements or the fact that the game is available on mobile devices. This is the result of Diablo Immortal's microtransactions, which although they were a bit pricey, weren't spun up out of thin air.
Diablo Immortal is doused in numerous in-game transactions proverbial wall of advertisements with exaggerated percents to convince players to believe that the more you purchase it, the better they'll save. It's been practiced in the mobile market for ages, however different the presentation may have appeared. You see it with Genshin Impact's Genesis Crystal store, where purchasing large amounts of money will give players a greater amount of exactly the same currency. You also see it in the case of Lapis -the currency that is paid found in Final Fantasy Brave Exvius -and entices players with "bonus" currency reaching into the thousands for packs of currency worth up to $100.
"A typical strategy for mobile games and any game using microtransactions, is to make the currency," an anonymous employee in the mobile game industry has told me. "Like the case, if I were to spend $1, it could result in two different currencies (gold and jewels for instance). It's helpful to disguise the actual cash value spent since there isn't a one-to-one conversion. Additionally, we place less favorable deals in front of other ones to make the other deals look more lucrative and the players believe that they are smarter by saving from the other deals."
"In the company I worked in, there were weekly events with unique prizes and they were designed to allow you to [...] complete it with uncommon in-game currency, which would allow you to take home one of the prizes. But the designers also had offer additional milestone prizes in addition to that principal prize, which will normally require cash to get ahead in the competition. Many of our milestones and metrics to measure whether an event was successful is obviously how much people spent. We also measured sentiment, however, I believe the top-level executives have always been more interested in whether the event made people spend."
Real-time money transactions aren't a novelty by any stretch or the imagination. Diablo Immortal didn't pioneer them and it's disingenuous to present that as truth. Blizzard's action-RPG isn't the root of the problem, but instead is the worst amalgamation of hundreds of free-to-play mobile and PC games. It comes with two distinct Battle Passes, each of which comes with different rewards, each exclusive to a character (and not to your entire roster) as well as too many different currencies for the average player to keep track of Diablo Immortal's market reads like a huge mobile marketplace.
The practices, even if they're faced with opposition but have now become commonplace in the gaming industry in general. One could argue that the prevalence of loot boxes or other real-money transactions within AAA games has been a factor in this predatory economy -- but the more that AAA gaming shifts towards a model of games-as services the more Diablo 2 Resurrected Ladder Items has similarities with smartphones that've been within this highly popular realm for nearly a decade.
