After Diablo 2 Resurrected was announced at BlizzCon 2018 in 2018, one participant in the crowd stood on the side of the developers of the free-to-play mobile game to question: "Is this an out-of-season April Fools' joke?" A general sense of vitriol and ridicule followed Diablo 2 Resurrected up until its recent launch. The vitriol hasn't lessened since. However, it's not the knee-jerk reaction to disappointing announcements, or the fact that Diablo 2 Resurrected is accessible for D2R Items mobile phones. It's a result of Diablo's microtransactions, that even though they're a bit shady, were not generated out of air.

Diablo 2 Resurrected is doused in many in-game transactionsit's like a wall of sales with exaggerated numbers to convince players that the more they buy it, the better they'll save. This is a common practice in the mobile marketplace for ages, however different the style of presentation might have been. This is evident with Genshin Impact's Genesis Crystal store, where buying huge amounts of currency will grant players a larger amount of the exact currency. It's also evident in the case of Lapis -the currency that is paid within Final Fantasy Brave Exvius -- which titillates players with "bonus" currency that goes into the thousands for packs valuing upward of $100.

"A most common strategy used in mobile games or any game with microtransactions involves complication of currency," an anonymous employee in the mobile game industry told me recently. "Like the case, if I were to spend $1, it could result in two currencies (gold and jewels, for example). This helps conceal the amount of cheap D2R Items cash actually spent since there isn't a one-to-one conversion. Additionally, we put worse deals [beside] other deals in order to make other deals look more lucrative and users feel they are smarter by saving out and taking advantage of the other deals."