These practices, though sometimes met with resistance are now commonplace within the overall industry. One could argue that the use of loot boxes and other real-money transactions within AAA games have played a role in the development of this unregulated economy, but the more that AAA gaming shifts towards the model of games-as-a-service more, the more it has D2R Items similarities to smartphones that've been within this extremely popular sphere for the past decade.
And this isn't just reflected in the use of paid currency to buy items such as gacha, but also in gacha mechanics, and the public disclosure of drop rates for more difficult items. Gacha is using in-game currency, whether it's free or bought through an in-game shop, in order to get something you want like pieces of equipment for instance, in the case of Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia, or characters in the ever popular (and constant) Fate/Grand Order or Genshin Impact.
In the case of D2R it's the use of Legendary Crests (which can be earned or purchased) to increase the odds of a gem that has a 5-star rating appearing in endgame dungeons. While not entirely conventional in its presentation (most gachas involve "rolling" in a limited-time banner) the players are engaged in the same kind of randomness similar to. In many ways this, it's like the Diablo franchise was working towards these kinds of mechanics since its inception in the words of Maddy Myers wrote a few weeks back.
D2R also, in simple terms, draws direct inspiration from an "feeding" method that a lot of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese mobile games have normalized for more than 10 years. "Feeding" means increasing the attributes, stats, or the rarity of an item by making duplicates of a drop. The duplicates then feed to an item of the same rarity in order to increase the stats overall of that item. Generally five copies are needed as the industry norm to max out a character or item.
My first introduction to "feeding" was through Fate/Grand Order, which was originally published to Japan in July of 2015 and grossed a total of $4 billion dollars worldwide in 2019. To ensure that a character is the very best it can be I needed duplicates of every character. If a certain banner came along I paid up to 300 euros in order for the character I'd coveted for years. However, I was unable to obtain the replicas I needed for this character's full potential. Since the rate for the top five-star characters hovering around one percent, it's no surprise I never managed to get a copy of the character during my time using the game (which I've since uninstalled). At the time of writing, Fate/Grand Order was the seventh most popular mobile game to be sold the past, and was placed in front of Konami's Puzzle and Dragons. The latter could be added to the list because it is also a gacha game.
During the GDC 2021 presentation, Genshin Impact developer Hoyoverse (previously Mihoyo) outright admitted that the way it created characters was focused on generating most money possible from Diablo 2 Resurrected Ladder Items its audiences. The Raiden Shogun and Kokomi character reruns in March 2022 alone netted the company over $33 million in revenues.
