So Blizzard announced today that Battle.net will be able to hold players funds, real cash, for both World of Warcraft and Diablo 3 players. The cash can then be used by players to purchase items from the Battle.net store or can be used in the Diablo 3 auction house to buy items. Money earned from the D3 auction house can also be added to the Battle.net Balance.
The catch is that the money cannot be taken out of the system, meaning if you’re a seller in the D3 auction house, you have to cash out after every auction, which by the way has four separate fees. No that wasn’t a typo, it actually has four fees.
So lets see how many times Blizzard is going to charge D3 sellers.
- Auction listing fee – Each account will receive a limited number of waivers for the listing fees, but serious sellers will go through those in a day or so.
- Auction closing fee
- Cash out fee – Sellers will have to select the cash out option for every auction if they don’t want it going to their Battle.net Balance, meaning sellers will have to pay a Cash Out fee for every auction.
- Paypal fee - Paypal takes a percentage of every transaction through their system, the more money involved the smaller the percentage. Since Blizzard is forcing sellers to cash out after every transaction, the percentage fee is going to be much higher then if you built up a large sum of money, then transferred it at once.
Ok, technically it’s only triple dipping cause the fourth fee is Paypal, but still. Is Blizzard serious? I can’t wait to see the fee list. Who in their right mind is going to use the Blizzard auction house when they can probably double their profits by using a blackmarket site.
I was all for the auction site, but this is ridiculous. As far as am concerned Blizzard opening a real-money-transaction (RMT) auction house for D3 legitimizes the market, but I’m not going to get gouged by fees. I’ll take my items else where.
