Diablo Immortal’s microtransactions weren’t designed in a vacuum

polygon.com:

When Diablo Immortal was announced at BlizzCon 2018, a lone member of the audience stood before the developers of the free-to-play mobile title to ask: “Is this an out-of-season April Fools’ joke?” This general vitriol and mockery followed Diablo Immortal up until its recent launch. And these sentiments haven’t diminished since. But it’s no longer the knee-jerk reaction to disappointing announcements, or the fact that the game is available on mobile devices. It’s the result of Diablo Immortal’s microtransactions, which, while predatory, weren’t spun up out of thin air.

Diablo Immortal is doused in layers of in-game transactions — a proverbial wall of offers with inflated percentages to convince players that the more they buy, the more they save. This has been common practice 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 currency will grant players an even larger amount of the same exact currency. You also see it in the case of Lapis — the paid currency in Final Fantasy Brave Exvius — which titillates players with “bonus” currency reaching into the thousands when purchasing packs valuing upward of $100.

“A common tactic for mobile games or any game with microtransactions is to complicate currency,” an anonymous employee working within the mobile game industry recently told me. “Like, if I spent $1, I might get two types of currencies (gold and jewels, for instance). It helps to obfuscate the actual cash value spent since there isn’t a one-to-one conversion. And, we also purposefully put worse deals [beside] other ones to make the other deals look more lucrative and players feel like they are