Sad Barbarian is sad about low gold prices.
Having gone live yesterday in America, gold is now available to buy on Diablo 3's real money auction house in Europe. For a mere 27 real pennies you can buy the lowest bulk unit of 100,000 virtual gold. That's 27 pence to unlock a small, game-breaking fortune in Diablo 3. Legitimising cheating, it seems, has made it damn cheap to do.
The update to the real money auction house follows last week's unlocking of the remaining commodities: your gems and your crafting materials. The minimum spend on the RMAH remains set at £1, meaning that at current prices you must purchase at least 400,000 gold. Blizzard take a cut of 15% of the sale price on all real-money transactions, as well as 15% of any amounts being transferred out of your Battle.net wallet. That is to say that, if you sold one million gold at the current going rate of £1.08, Blizzard would make a cool 16p on the transaction (and a further 13p when you remove your gold-selling gains from your wallet).
The rock bottom price of gold at the moment is likely due to the Scrooge McDuck style pools of gold coins hoarded by players waiting for the opportunity to sell, which are now flooding the real money auction house and pulling prices down. I'm no economist, but I'm guessing it can only go up from here.
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