Peoww News

In a move that’s probably not going to surprise anyone aware of Activision Blizzard’s standard revenue generation practices (I feel dirty even saying that), they’ve unveiled a doozy to rival their forthcoming Call Of Duty MW3 Elite service. In an announcement on their website, the Blizzard tentacle of the drooling multidimensional behemoth that threatens to consume everyone that lies quivering before it; it’s corporeal form represented by the entity known to us as Kotick; unveiled the forthcoming Diablo III beta. Contained therein is information regarding an in-game auction house. Fine you may think, it’ll be just like in WOW where you trade with in-game currency.

Now here’s the kicker, they’ll allow you to list items for actual cash money. I guess they’ll call it ‘monetising the transaction’ on their annual balance sheet. Hypothetically you could get a random drop of a rare item your character class can’t use and as opposed to previous versions where you could sell the item to a merchant upon returning to town, this time you can put it up on the in-game auction site for either virtual or cold hard cash.

The beauty of the system (from Blizzard’s point of view at least) is that you’ll pay to list the item you want rid of, the person buying the loot has to pay too. And once you’ve got the money, if you then buy another item with the balance of your account they get more cash, only swapped around from the selling point of view. The crux being that Blizzard will get paid four times in this process. When you multiply that by the many thousands of transactions that’ll no doubt take place upon the game’s launch, that’s a whole stack of cash Blizzard will add to their coffers.

I’d not be surprised if this were a dry-run for a similar system to be implemented in WOW. As a correspondent in this webcast put it, you’re effectively gold farming for Blizzard. Ni hao! Ian