Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House
By J-Dub
Blizzard recently announced information about their upcoming blockbuster Diablo 3, they talked about the beta that is now out, and the game is strictly online (the same as Starcraft 2). The big news is they will have a real money auction house. There will also be a separate auction house were in-game gold is the currency. This has some gamers enraged and others thinking how they can make some quick cash. Was this a good move by Blizzard or a way for them to make more money off a game without charging a monthly fee?
Now Blizzard is not implementing this service for free. They will be taking a fee for each item put up for auction. That fee amount has not yet been announced yet, but varies in different regions. After the item sells, if it does, Blizzard will take an additional fee. If the item does not sell Blizzard will not charge you the second fee and the item will be returned to your stash. At any point you can cash out the money you have and spend it on anything you would like, or you can keep the money and buy yourself something nice for you character. Now to avoid currency exchange problems the auction house will be split up into regions.
Blizzard is aware that they are taking a big step in adding this real money auction house. They know that there are people out there that use third party sites to sell gear and other in-game goods. I would have to believe that this is their answer to eliminate these sites. This way Blizzard can make money, and players that do this have a safe way of actually receiving the goods they purchase. Prior transactions have resulted in a “poor player experience and countless customer-service issues involving scams and item/account theft, to name a few,” Blizzard has stated. The auction house is “a convenient, powerful, and fully integrated tool to meet the demand of players who wished to purchase or sell items for real-world currency, and who would likely have turned to a less-secure third-party service for this convenience.”
When you are a company like Blizzard, every decision you make will always have an impact on the media. So I spent some time talking to friends and reading forums trying to get a feel of how some gamers feel about this. There were some people that wrote off the game and were extremely angry because they feel like Blizzard are just catering to farmers and it will ruin the economy of the game. But others were not worried about it and kind of excited to see how it will play out. To those opposed to the idea of this, all I can say is look at Diablo 2. People would go to these third party sites to buy gear and ran a risk of being screwed over. This is a safe way of buying gear and actually getting it. Also, players that do not have time to spend hours and hours to get gear can go out and buy it. Some say that defeats the whole purpose of gearing a character but the people that are going to buy gear are going to do it one way or another. The gamers that like this feel that they have a little more motivation to grind and get gear. They can turn gear that would be useless to their toon and turn that into a positive, either with gear or money. In this economy people are just trying to make a buck and why not.
I feel that this is actually a split decision in my eyes. Personally, I am not going to buy gear; it’s not how I play the game. There is a certain sense of accomplishment when I get what I’m hunting down. But I mean if I get something that is in high demand that I don’t need, why not try and make some money? If another company announced this I would be worried but if anyone can pull this off successfully it’s Blizzard.