In the case of Diablo 2 Resurrected this is the method of using Legendary Crests (which can be bought or earned) to increase the odds of a five-star gem appearing in the dungeons of the endgame. While it's not completely traditional in its presentation (most gachas are played by "rolling" on a short-lived banner) Players are engaging in randomness in the same way. In many ways in many ways, D2R Items is a classic Diablo franchise was building toward these mechanics since its beginning, as Maddy Myers wrote a few weeks back.
Diablo 2 Resurrected also, in clear terms, draws directly from an "feeding" gameplay mechanic a lot of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese mobile games have normalized for more than 10 years. "Feeding" involves increasing the stats, attributes or the rarity of an item by having a duplicate of the drop. The duplicates are fed to an item with the same rarity , thereby increasing the overall stats of said item. Generally, five copies are required as the industry norm to max out a character or item.
My first introduction to "feeding" was Fate/Grand Order, which was first released on Japan in July of 2015 and grossed a total of $4 billion dollars globally in 2019. To create a character that was the best that it can be, I needed to obtain copies of each. If a certain campaign came around I paid over 300 euros to acquire the 5-star character I had coveted throughout the years. However, I did not get the replicas I needed to fully appreciate this character's full potential. With the average rate for highest-rated 5-star characters hovering around 1percent, it's no surprise I never managed to get a copy of the character in my time engaging in this game (which I've since uninstalled). As of the end of July, 2021 Fate/Grand Order was the seventh highest-grossing mobile game of all time, putting it ahead of Konami's Puzzle and Dragons, which could be added to the list because it is also a gacha-based game.
In an GDC 2021 discussion, Genshin Impact developer Hoyoverse (previously Mihoyo) outright admitted that the method used to create characters was based on generating the most capital possible from its audience. The Raiden Shogun as well as Kokomi character reruns from March 2022 alone netted the company over $33 million in revenues.
The moment was immortalized by humor and memes, the bulk of it rooted in disappointing expectations of the public: Fans attending BlizzCon 2018 had been hoping for "Diablo 2 Resurrected" news. But the reason for this was an unease about Diablo 2 Resurrected Ladder Items mobile games in the West which is where the adoption of smartphones as a gaming platform is slower than in the other regions of the world.
