Diablo Immortal also, in no uncertain terms, pulls direct inspiration from an "feeding" technique that many Japanese, Korean, and Chinese mobile games have normalized for over 10 years. "Feeding" involves raising the attributes, stats, or rarity of an item by getting a duplicate of a drop. The duplicates then feed to an item with similar rarity to boost the overall stats for the D2R Items. Generally there are five copies as industry standard to max out a character or item.
My first exposure to "feeding" was in Fate/Grand Order, which was first launched by Japan in July of 2015. It made a profit of $4 billion dollars across the globe in 2019. To ensure that a character is the very best it can possibly be I needed duplicates of every character. When a particular advertisement came along, I ended up dropping over 300 euros to purchase the 5-star character I had coveted since the beginning of time. However, I wasn't able to get the duplicates I needed to be able to appreciate this character's full potential. The rates for the most popular 5-star characters currently hovering around 1%, it was not a surprise that I failed to obtain a duplicate of the character during my time playing the game (which I have since uninstalled). As of July 20, 2021, Fate/Grand Order was the seventh most popular mobile game to be sold all time. It was just next to Konami's Puzzle & Dragons, which is, as I mentioned, is also a gacha-based game.
In a GDC 2021 discussion, Genshin Impact developer Hoyoverse (previously Mihoyo) outright admitted that its process for creating characters was to generate the most capital possible from its customers. This year's Raiden Shogun as well as Kokomi character reruns of March 2022 alone brought the company more than $33 million in revenues.
The moment was immortalized in jokes and memes, a lot of which stemmed from low expectations from the crowd: People who attended BlizzCon 2018 had been hoping for "Buy D2R items Xbox" announcements. But it also stemmed from an unease about game consoles in the West as the adoption of smartphones as a gaming platform has been slower than the majority parts of the planet.