Real-money transactions aren't novel by any stretch of the imagination. Diablo 2 Resurrected didn't pioneer them but it's disingenuous to present that as truth. It's not Blizzard's original action-RPG that is the main of the problem, but instead is the worst amalgamation of hundreds of different free-to-play mobile and PC games. It comes with two distinct Battle Passes, each of D2R Items which comes with different rewards, each specific to the character (and not your overall roster) and a myriad of different currencies for the average player to keep track of Diablo 2 Resurrected's financial system reads like a huge mobile marketplace.
They are, despite being met with resistance but have now become commonplace in the entire industry. One could argue that the use of loot boxes and other real-money transactions within AAA games has created this type of predatory economy -- but the more AAA gaming shifts toward the models of games-as services is the more it has the same characteristics as portable games which have been within this very popular sector for over a decade.
And this isn't just reflected in the usage of currency that is paid to purchase items, but also in gacha mechanics as well as in the public disclosure of drop rates for the more scarce items. Gacha is the act of playing with in-game currency, no matter if it's free or acquired through an in-game shop, to acquire something random items, such as equipment pieces in the case Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia or characters from the ever-popular (and long-running) Fate/Grand Order or Genshin Impact.
In the case of Diablo 2 Resurrected they use Legendary Crests (which can be obtained or bought) to increase the chances of a five-star gem showing up in the dungeons and dungeons endgame. While it's not completely conventional in its presentation (most gachas are played by "rolling" using a time-limited banner) gamers are engaging in randomness similar to. In many ways in many ways, gamers are using the Diablo franchise has been working towards these types of mechanics from its beginning according to a piece Maddy Myers wrote a few weeks back.
Diablo 2 Resurrected also, in unambiguous terms, draws direct inspiration from the "feeding" method that a lot of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese mobile games have normalized for more than a decade. "Feeding" means increasing the stats, attributes or rarity of an item through receiving a duplicate drop. The duplicates are then fed to an item with the same rarity to increase the overall stats of said item. In general five copies are needed in order to max out a character or item.
My first experience with "feeding" was Fate/Grand Order, which was initially out on Japan in July of 2015 and earned a total of 4 billion dollars worldwide in 2019. In order to create the most memorable character it can possibly be, I needed to obtain copies of every one. Then, when a particular campaign came around I paid upward of 300 euros to purchase the 5-star character I'd coveted since a long time. However, I wasn't able to get the replicas I needed to realize the full potential of this character. The rates for the most sought-after 5-star characters hovering around one percent, it's no surprise I never managed to acquire a copy of the character during my time in the game (which I've since removed). As of July 2021, Fate/Grand Order was the seventh highest grossing mobile game of all time, putting it after Konami's Puzzle Dragons, which also, I'm guessing, is also a gacha game.
During an GDC 2021 speech, Genshin Impact developer Hoyoverse (previously Mihoyo) outright admitted that the method used to create characters was to get the most money possible from its fans. The Raiden Shogun as well as Kokomi character reruns of cheap D2R Items March 2022 alone brought the company over $33 million in revenue.
