Now I’m no mathematician. That’s why I made a barely functioning website focusing on video games in an ill-fated attempt to earn a living writing rather than solving rubrics cubes or coding or whatever it is that maths people do. If calculators didn’t take their jobs then maybe I’m safe from AI writers for now.

What isn’t safe though is your goddamn wallets especially if you like dressing up your in-game avatars in unique swag like little demonic digital Barbies.

To buy everything currently available in Diablo 4’s premium currency real money store, as of today would cost you a whopping 58,320 imaginary Diablo Dollars. Of course, all money is made up if you really think about it, but that means that in this instance it is somehow even more made up than the digital money that the bank keeps for us.

A basic skin in Diablo 4 costs around 1400 of Diablos in-game currency ‘Platinum’. There’s even a weapon pack on there for 1,200 hundred platinum.

It costs 14 Australian dollarydoos to buy 1000 credits. That’s not enough to even buy the already overpriced weapon skin pack let alone a new outfit for your character, which is about the size of a Mortal Kombat characters foot on screen meaning you need to really squint to even see your character’s new look outside of the pause menu and character selection.

So, to actually buy the basic skin you can spend $14.95 for 1000 platinum then you’ll need to add another $7.50 to bump that up to the 1500 platinum required. That’s 22 bucks for one basic skin. Or you could buy 2800 platinum for $37.45 which is enough to buy one premium skin.

Diablo 4’s real money store has 61 cosmetics packs available right now.

To get them all would cost 58320 in-game credits. That is 700 dollars’ worth of digital clothes, that’s just shy of my monthly rent. What’s worse is that this is a rotating storefront, meaning that that is only the items that I could buy today! There’s more locked away ready to be rotated back in, and surely many more being designed right now ready to drop into that rotating pool.

Now I get it. I Do. Digital items do have value to us, sometimes just as much as anything else we own. There are some cosmetics I’ve earned in games that hold as much weight in the real world as my Master’s Degree in Screenwriting.  

My in-game avatar’s drip is pretty much as real as the shirt in my bedroom drawer thanks to some Schrodinger’s cat logic. The shirt in my drawer is both in there and not in there until I open the drawer to confirm its existence.

My digital clothing exists when I load up the game and see it. My brain’s ability to have a sense of object permanence allows me to be pretty chuffed about owning these digital items as though they were real and tangible.

So Cosmetics in games are important. They add a sense of originality to your character, that unique getup can help you stand out from the crowd. Cosmetics can also act as satisfying in-game rewards. The things that I’ve done in the past for new digital items is downright shameful. 

For a collector or digital hoarder collecting digital cosmetics can be a big part of the completion process. It feels good to be able to work towards something and video games normally allow you to achieve that, unlike real life.

So when cosmetics are locked behind real cash stores it takes away any sense of achievement for earning it in the game. It also takes away your ability to gain a sense of completion from said game, without the following feelings of intense guilt and regret from the immense debt you’ve accrued.

And while Diablo is a live service title, so it is inherently incompletable already, it could at least let us completionists feel like we are able to keep up with it in some way. 

The seasons are good, and the developers need to be paid for the work they put in, I get that. Multiplayer games truly rely on communities to stay engaging and keep up with content updates so that people stay around long enough to allow for a multiplayer presence whenever new or returning players jump in. So, it’s nice to have new Diablo content every 3 months to dive into that freshens things up a bit. It’s better than having to wait a decade for a sequel to get that demon-slaying fix. 

But Microtransactions are a solution to a problem that has since been solved better. “How do you add things to a game post-launch to keep people invested without dividing the community by restricting content updates to those that have paid money?”.

Sell microtransactions. Have the whales, those poor people who can’t help themselves essentially pay for everyone else’s ticket in. And it works! It generates billions of dollars of additional revenue for F all extra work.

But I’d argue that Battle Passes have already improved on that formula and provided a much better solution to this problem for the player and the game. Pick that one Blizzard! Throw all your cosmetics into the battle pass, more people will buy it and you won’t need to rely on whales to keep the game alive. Overdeliver so that we feel good about supporting the game and not nickel and dimed for being suckered into spending forty bucks on a skin. Personally, I like completing Diablo’s seasonal Battle Pass it’s somewhat rewarding and allows for a decent sense of completion. 

But eventually, like most games before it, it’s going to dawn on me that the carrot that I’m chasing isn’t all that fulfilling. And I’ll ask myself “Why am I completing the battle pass to collect all the battle pass items when I can never actually get all the items in the game itself? Why try to keep up with something that I can never actually keep up with without leading to complete and utter financial ruin?” There’s enough futility in the real world already, we don’t need it in our escapism.