The reason two in-app currencies are harder to leave than one

You pay $4.99 for 500 gems. The chest costs 90 gems, or you can convert gems to coins and buy it for 12,000 coins, and a bundle offers 40,000 coins for 350 gems. Somewhere in those exchanges the question you started with — how many dollars is this chest — has quietly become unanswerable without a calculator you will not open.

What everyone sees

A second currency looks like a convenience or a bit of flavour — gems for premium purchases, coins for everyday ones. Its real work is on the price. Each layer of conversion between the dollar you paid and the item you want adds a translation step, and every translation loosens the connection between spending and its cost, so the pain that would normally check a purchase never fully arrives.

What is actually happening

Prelec and Loewenstein’s account of the pain of paying holds that spending hurts most when it is transparent and immediate, and that this pain acts as a natural brake on consumption. Soman’s field studies of payment transparency confirmed the corollary: the more abstract and less salient the form of payment, the more people spend, because a less tangible medium registers less as a cost. A chain of in-app currencies is payment abstraction manufactured on purpose — each conversion moves the purchase one more step from the felt loss of real money, so the item is bought with a token that barely feels like money at all.

Why it stays hidden

The design hides behind the appearance of choice and value — more currencies look like more ways to get a deal. The layering also means no single screen ever shows the real dollar cost of an item, so the information needed to feel the price is never assembled in one place. Because each conversion is individually trivial, the cumulative blurring is never experienced as a decision, only as the ordinary texture of the game’s economy.