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Real-money transactions aren’t novel by any stretch or imagination. Diablo Immortal didn’t pioneer them, and it would be disingenuous to present that as fact. Blizzard’s action-RPG isn’t the root cause Diablo IV Gold, but instead an unbalanced mix of hundreds of different free-to-play mobile and PC games. With two distinct Battle Passes, both with specific rewards that are specific to the character (and not the entire roster) as well as too many different currencies for the average player to keep track of Diablo Immortal’s economics read like a giant mobile market.
Even though they’re sometimes met with resistance but have now become commonplace in the overall industry. One could argue that the prevalence of loot boxes or other real-money transactions in AAA games have played a role in the development of this precarious economy. However, the more that AAA gaming shifts towards a games-as-service model and the more it shares similarities to game-based mobile apps that’ve been in this wildly popular field for over a decade.
And this isn’t just apparent in the use paid currency for items such as gacha, but also in gacha mechanics, and the disclosure of drop rates among the more scarce items. Gacha is the act of making use of in-game currency, regardless of whether it’s free, or purchased through an in-game shop to obtain something at random: pieces of equipment, in the case Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia, or characters in the ever-popular (and long-running) Fate/Grand Order or Genshin Impact.
In Diablo Immortal’s case, they use Legendary Crests (which can be bought or earned) to increase the chance of a five-star gem appearing in dungeons that end the game. While it’s not completely conventional in its design (most gacha are performed by “rolling” in a limited-time banner) gamers are playing randomness in the same way. In many ways this is how players are engaging in the same way buy Diablo 4 Gold. Diablo franchise was working toward these mechanics since it’s inception, in the words of Maddy Myers wrote a few weeks in the past.