When Diablo Immortal was announced at BlizzCon 2018, one participant in the crowd stood before the developers of the free-to-play mobile title to inquire: "Is this an out-of-season April Fools' joke?" This general vitriol and mockery ensued from Diablo Immortal up until its recent release. This vitriol hasn't abated since. But this isn't the knee-jerk reaction to disappointing announcements or the fact that Diablo Immortal is now available through mobile device. It's a result of Diablo's microtransactions, that although they were a bit pricey, weren't made up from thin air.
Diablo Immortal is doused in many in-game transactions that's a wall of deals with exaggerated numbers to convince players of the fact that, the greater the amount they purchase, the more they save. This has been a standard practice in the mobile marketplace for many years, however different the way of presenting it may have looked. This is evident with Genshin Impact's Genesis Crystal store, where buying large amounts of currency can grant players a larger amount of exactly the same currency. It's also evident in the instance of Lapis -the currency paid within Final Fantasy Brave Exvius -It entices players through "bonus" currencies that can reach the hundreds of thousands after purchasing packs with a value of up to $100.
"A usual tactic in mobile games or other games using microtransactions, is to make the currencies," an anonymous employee employed in the mobile game industry has told me. "Like, if I spent $1, I'd get two kinds of currency (gold and jewels for instance). This can help to conceal the real value of the money since there isn't a one-to-one conversion. And, we also purposefully placed less lucrative deals on top of other ones to make the others appear more lucrative and let players feel that they are smarter by saving out and getting the other deals."
"In the business I was in, there were weekly events that offered unique prizes, and they were designed to allow you to [...] participate with rare in-game currency, which allowed you to win one of the major prizes. However, designers had to include extra milestone prizes after that principal prize, which will generally require you to spend real money for the chance to gain an advantage in the contest. A lot of our benchmarks and indicators to gauge if an event did well is obviously how much individuals spent. We also measured sentiment, however, I believe the top-level executives generally cared more about whether that event helped people spend."
Real-time payments aren't brand new by any stretch of the imagination. Diablo Immortal didn't pioneer them and it's disingenuous to present that as the case. The action RPG from Blizzard isn't the primary cause, but instead the most ineffective amalgamation of hundreds of free-to-play mobile and PC games. With two different Battle Passes each with different rewards, each exclusive to a character (and not part of your overall roster) with too many different currencies available for the average player to track, Diablo Immortal's economy reads like a huge mobile marketplace.
