Playfin

Activision-Blizzard’s upcoming action RPG, Diablo 3, has recently been at the center of a heated debate. Blizzard announced several months ago that Diablo 3 would feature an auction house which would give players the option to sell or purchase in-game items for cold hard cash rather than gold, the game’s virtual currency. Fan reaction has been quite mixed, with some declaring the move inevitable, while others have decried it as a blatant cash-grab. How does it all work, and why is Activision-Blizzard doing this?

Over the last few years, Blizzard has been adding social features to their games which are tied to their central account management and matchmaking system, Battle.net, rather than unique to individual games. As a consequence, players can now see what their friends are doing in World of Warcraft while playing Starcraft 2, and vice versa. The next step in their plan to create a unified experience for players is to create a brand-new currency called “Battle.net Balance” which can be used to purchase goods and services in all of their games. This would allow players to do things like use the Balance they earn from completed auction house transactions to pay for their WoW subscriptions. There’s more to it than that, however.

To date, Blizzard’s primary argument in defense of their real-money auction house has been that it is necessary to combat the shady, private real-money trading sites that popped up for Diablo 1 and 2. They have said that if it’s taken for granted that these services are going to exist, and they most certainly will, it makes sense for them to be regulated and made safer. Naturally, they claim, the best way to ensure that their customers don’t get ripped off is to run the RMT operations themselves. Furthermore, they argue, this allows them to offer players unique and convenient opportunities, like paying for one game with money made in another.

So far, this all sounds pretty reasonable, right? Well, here’s the catch — if you put cash into the system, it’s not coming back out as cash. It *is* possible to get cash out of the system, but only in certain regions which have not been named. The way this works is that when a player posts an item on the auction house, they will be able to choose their desired method of receiving payment — either gold, BNET Balance, or cash via Paypal, minus a transaction fee (and again, only in certain regions). The really crazy part is that you can actually sell GOLD on the auction house, and presumably in certain regions this would mean that you could both buy and sell gold for real money.

What do you folks think — is Blizzard merely protecting its customers’ interests as it claims, or is it simply muscling in on the fantastically lucrative RMT market for its own benefit?

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