Diablo 2 Resurrected is doused in various in-game transactionsthe proverbial wall of deals with exaggerated percentages to make players believe in that the bigger the number of items they purchase and save, the more money they will save. This is a common practice in the mobile market for decades, regardless of how different the appearance may have appeared. It's evident in Genshin Impact's Genesis Crystal store, where purchasing large quantities of money will give players a greater amount of the exact currency. Also, you can see it in the instance of D2R Items Lapis -the currency you pay for within Final Fantasy Brave Exvius -and entices players with "bonus" currency that reaches the thousands when purchasing packs with a value of up to $100.

"A common tactic for mobile games and any game that has microtransactions is to get rid of currency," an anonymous employee who works in the mobile gaming industry recently explained to me. "Like for instance, if I spend $1, I may get two types of currencies (gold and jewels, as an example). It helps to obfuscate the actual cash value spent since there's not a single conversion. We also placed less lucrative deals on top of other deals to make other deals appear more lucrative and the players believe that they're smarter when they save out and getting the other deals."

"In the firm I was in, we held weekly events with exclusive prizes and were planned to let you [...] participate with uncommon in-game currency, which would let you get one of the major prizes. Designers also had to offer additional milestone prizes in addition to that major prize, which usually require spending real cash to be able to win the event. The majority of our milestones and measures to determine if an event did well is obviously how much individuals spent. We did take into account sentiment, however, I'm convinced that the higher-ups always cared more about if the event enticed people to spend."

Real-time payments aren't brand new in any way by any stretch of the imagination. Diablo 2 Resurrected didn't pioneer them but it's disingenuous to present that as the case. The action-RPG from Blizzard isn't the primary reason, but rather the worst amalgamation of hundreds of different free-to-play mobile and PC games. It comes with two distinct Battle Passes, each of which comes with their own rewards that remain only available to characters (and not the entire roster) as well as too many different currencies available for the average player to keep track of Diablo 2 Resurrected's financial system reads as a massive mobile marketplace.

These practices, though sometimes met with resistance but have now become commonplace in the game industry as a whole. One could argue that popularity of loot box or other real-money transactions within AAA games have contributed to this kind of unregulated economy, but the more that AAA gaming moves towards the game-as-a-service model as it shifts to the games-as-service model, the more the same D2R Ladder Items buy​ characteristics as mobile games that have been within this extremely popular sphere for more than a decade.