The game loses less then 10% of it's player base and armaggedon occurs -.-... Like seriously wtf, who cares it's less then 10 percent!
I just guess the 90+% don't matter in the game, cause y'know Blizzard will default and become bankrupt losing $15 million of it's $180 million a month profit just off of subscriptions. Just sayin...
First much more than half the Wow population is from China, in which country they are far from paying $15 per month.
Then 600k + 300k nearly 1 000 0000 which is roundly 1/4 of their non Chinese subs. Quite a bunch if you wonder.
"Regarding WoW's numbers it's made up of the following: at peak about 4.5 million in NA and Europe plus a large number from Asia where WoW is basically a f2p and counts people who play once for 2 minutes as "subscribers". EU population is roughly the same as NA. So NA population at peak was about 2.2 million. WoW is nowhere near it's peak now"
Before you try to act smart, try looking at the date of the link you sent me... Year old news is year old news, how about an update with current figures. Btw wrath was still out when that post was made... So yea
I said this several years ago when people were saying Warhammer was going to be a WoW Killer.
What is going to kill WoW is time not a new game. Eventually people are going to move on to a new thing.
Graphics were dated a long time ago, end game is basically the same since BC, (Raid or Dailies) At least the Rep grind isn't as bad as in the BC Days. Getting Shattar rep for my flying mount took forever in BC.
So people are going to move on. Almost everyone takes a break from WoW and eventually their break will become permanent. Probably around the time when Titan comes out.
As for me, I am really looking forward to "The Secret World" "World of darkness" and "ToR" I am currently trying Black prophecy but it isn't engaging enough to get me to stop playing WoW.
Personally, I don't care one way or the other about World of Warcraft, but I'm not going to cling to the words of some hating report from "developer.com" (or whatever).
Warcraft is number 1. Has been, always will be. They have survived all the "wow killers", they survived Lord of the Rings ripping off Lich King to make their Witch King, and are still standing stronger than ever.
I was not aware that a character from a novel written in the 1950s was ripping off a game that was released in the 2000s.
Or were you not aware that the Witch King of Angmar was around long, LONG before Blizzard ever started ripping off Lord of the Rings?
Hint: Warcraft was originally very heavily influenced by Tolkien.
GRIND sucks? You wanna be max level in a month? Since when did society award easy-goers and lazy-fools? MAKES ME PHOBIC OF STUPIDITY!
I guarantee theres a hell of alot more then that. ALOT more......And they will continue to bleed subs. The game is old, dying. It had its day in the sun, now a slow death is in process..
/shrug
Whatever happened to the IN BIOWARE WE TRUST signatures?
What Dalanon fails to mention is that Blizzard will not be selling ANY items in the Cash shop, only the players will be able to.
That's a totally fair statement and I hope your right. I'm of the mind though that you will see more than just player auctions there. They would of course be listed as if they were by real players, but I have to play devil's advocate and say I find it hard to believe that blizzard won't be slipping some items into the AH, especially rarer, harder to get ones that would bring profit. And after a while they might not even try to hide it. It will start with vanity items and possibly go from there. Lets say best case scenario, even if they don't put the actual items up for sale, they are still from what i understand taking a "fee" from each transaction. That's going to add up fast and they are going to encourage this to get max profitability.
I'm not trying to be a total tool about this, but I really like playing a good mmo and where blizzard goes, the industry follows at the moment. I know it's all doom and gloom to say it's a pandora's box, but changes like this are hard to reverse, especially by one of the giants in the industry, and it's probably only going to get worse from here. There are a lot of things in the last few decades that went from art form/entertainment with resonable profit backing it, to totally commercial corporate entities that are being milked for every penny so millionaires can become billionaires (tv, sports, movies ect...). So they day might not be as far off as you think where you are paying 30-50 dollars a month for your favorite mmo, weather it be in actual subscription fees, or where it's a "free to play" game where you can't do half the actual content or get many of the good items unless you get nickled and dimed to death in mini transactions and a la carte fees.
I know, it sounds crazy now, but it also sounded crazy a few decades ago to say tv was ever going to cost much. Most good content on tv was free (paid for by advertisers). Now cable and dish subscriptions often cost 50-100 dollars a month to subscribe to, and of course as time went on a lot of the good shows have moved to cable/dish and we still get all the adds on top of it. And on top of that you pay a ton of money for tv a month now and they still have the balls to ask you to pay a la carte for a bunch of stations or pay a whole nother price for a higher "teir" of programming.
None of this might ever happen in gamming.....but it's headed in that direction and blizzard is helping to pave the way.
Sorry Blizzard but you take way to long between updates and Cata was just a major let down for me personally... I always defended Blizzard for taking so long to release new expansions and games because I knew they would be great, but after Cata that changed. I jumped over to Starcraft only to find out I can only play terran missions and have to wait years to complete the game... That's cool I'll just play Diablo III... Nevermind, I'll be waiting for years there too. Does anybody know if Diablo II has been fully updated?
However, I think it's more than just that. Blizzard has basically trivialized the entire game over the past few years. When you had to really work at reaching the level cap, some people washed out along the way, but many more actually learned how to be good players as they played. Now, the journey to level cap is so ridiculously easy that no one washes out and bad players can reach the cap with out having improved much during the journey.
So, now something like 98% of the content that they invested so much money, time and man hours into is pointless filler and all that's left is an end game that's not for everyone, but populated by anyone who can rub two brain cells together and call it thought.
Not a good combination.
Brilliant exit strategy if they have WoW's replacement waiting in the wings, ready for launch as soon as they need it, but I don't get the impresion that is the case.
anyone else find it humerous that wow has lost more subs in the last year then every other AAA mmo on the market has total added up? /snicker
while this may not be the immediate undoing of wow to lose around 10% of its player base, losing over a million subs in 12 months has to have gotten the attention of the greedier money mongers over at blizzard that have been spending those billions of dollars on diamond encrusted toiletries and solid gold enimas.
anyone else find it humerous that wow has lost more subs in the last year then every other AAA mmo on the market has total added up? /snicker
while this may not be the immediate undoing of wow to lose around 10% of its player base, losing over a million subs in 12 months has to have gotten the attention of the greedier money mongers over at blizzard that have been spending those billions of dollars on diamond encrusted toiletries and solid gold enimas.
please get your facts straight Aion has over around 4 million, Rift is also close to one mill. I mean, I couldn't care less how many subs a game has but Blizzard losing subs should show everyone that the age of copying wowlike mechanics and removing deep progression is not gonna cut it forever.
Yes I had fun from Vanilla tilll 3.0 but then everything gone downhill extremely fast.
I think we'll see more creativity again, instead of one game for everyone, we'll see super easy games made for the FPS, wellfare and instant gratification crowd and very deep ones made for dedicated players plus some pure PVE and PVP games.
for me thats a win/win cause everyone will finally get the game they are looking for again.
We need a MMORPG Cataclysm asap, finish the dark age of MMORPGS now!
"Everything you're bitching about is wrong. People don't have the time to invest in corpse runs, impossible zones, or long winded quests. Sometimes, they just want to pop on and play." "Then maybe MMORPGs aren't for you."
Rift is close to 1 mil? Have you been on the Earth recently? Why don't you take the most accurate sample size, you can possibly get - xfire and mathematically quantify the value somewhere closer to 350-400k. A bit above EVE and Lotro and close to Aion (excluding significant part of the Aion's Asian market).
Rift is close to 1 mil? Have you been on the Earth recently? Why don't you take the most accurate sample size, you can possibly get - xfire and mathematically quantify the value somewhere closer to 350-400k. A bit above EVE and Lotro and close to Aion (excluding significant part of the Aion's Asian market).
The above is actually false as of 4/08/2011 if we follow the poster's logic.
Hours
Wow=152335
Rift = 9897
Ratio is around 15:1
Calculate this to sub numbers in the same ratio:11.3M / 15 = 750k ish
So around 700k-800k.
'Close to 1M' seems accurate by your logic.
Gdemami - Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
I don't think the subscribers go down because Blizzard did anything specifically wrong. Sure, people can disagree with this or that, but that's mostly a matter of personal preferences. I think that in the end, it's just that most players have simply seen about everything (maybe except some 85 raids) in the game.
I tried now the "return to a week", and had the choice: Either grinding gear with my 85 chars so they can go raiding, or play with a low level twink. So I was twinking a bit. But I have just seen all the low level dungeons, so there is nothing new to experience. They're not exceptioanlly difficult either. And the immersion is killed by the dungeon finder and instant travel. For people like me, nothing is left.
Man, the total is down to 11.1ish million subs, Blizzard probably isn't panicing yet. If the subs keeps sinking then maybe they will, but I doubt that the suits will start panicing for a while. They have more than enough subs to keep making a profit, at least for a while. Could be due to a crappy economy, summer, peeps getting tired of grinding the same content, or any number of reasons. /shrug It's too early to claim the sky is falling or even get a little worried.
Honestly, they need to find a better way to extend content other than gating it by making you do the same dailies over and over to progress through an area. To move past the first phase of their new content, you have to do the same quests 15 days in a row...to reach the end of it, it's the same quests for 40 days in a row.
Personally I think it'd be nice if they added a content generator like they had in Ryzom or CoH; let people experience player-created dungeons. Instead of loot they could hand out tokens for dungeon completion for mounts/cosmetic things. What better way to add more content than having your playerbase doing the work for you?
WOW is a chore endgame, they should be grateful they kept peoples doing the chore for so long, now they are tired, finally. As for myself i've been tired for 2 years now.
Well i know at least one of those 300,000 left WoW to join our table top PnP rpg group. He was tired of the limitations in WoW, and rather enjoys the real social interaction that a live RPG offers.
Rift is close to 1 mil? Have you been on the Earth recently? Why don't you take the most accurate sample size, you can possibly get - xfire and mathematically quantify the value somewhere closer to 350-400k. A bit above EVE and Lotro and close to Aion (excluding significant part of the Aion's Asian market).
The above is actually false as of 4/08/2011 if we follow the poster's logic.
Hours
Wow=152335
Rift = 9897
Ratio is around 15:1
Calculate this to sub numbers in the same ratio:11.3M / 15 = 750k ish
So around 700k-800k.
'Close to 1M' seems accurate by your logic.
Not really. Xfire does not really reflect or represent Asian market - as stated in the last sentence. So following my logic, you have to take into account that WoW has around 5m subscribers in EU/NA (according to several published articles on the state of the subscribtion base in EU/NA), in which case the Rift sub base would be down accordingly to 350-400k.
What Dalanon fails to mention is that Blizzard will not be selling ANY items in the Cash shop, only the players will be able to.
That's a totally fair statement and I hope your right. I'm of the mind though that you will see more than just player auctions there. They would of course be listed as if they were by real players, but I have to play devil's advocate and say I find it hard to believe that blizzard won't be slipping some items into the AH, especially rarer, harder to get ones that would bring profit. And after a while they might not even try to hide it. It will start with vanity items and possibly go from there. Lets say best case scenario, even if they don't put the actual items up for sale, they are still from what i understand taking a "fee" from each transaction. That's going to add up fast and they are going to encourage this to get max profitability.
I'm not trying to be a total tool about this, but I really like playing a good mmo and where blizzard goes, the industry follows at the moment. I know it's all doom and gloom to say it's a pandora's box, but changes like this are hard to reverse, especially by one of the giants in the industry, and it's probably only going to get worse from here. There are a lot of things in the last few decades that went from art form/entertainment with resonable profit backing it, to totally commercial corporate entities that are being milked for every penny so millionaires can become billionaires (tv, sports, movies ect...). So they day might not be as far off as you think where you are paying 30-50 dollars a month for your favorite mmo, weather it be in actual subscription fees, or where it's a "free to play" game where you can't do half the actual content or get many of the good items unless you get nickled and dimed to death in mini transactions and a la carte fees.
I know, it sounds crazy now, but it also sounded crazy a few decades ago to say tv was ever going to cost much. Most good content on tv was free (paid for by advertisers). Now cable and dish subscriptions often cost 50-100 dollars a month to subscribe to, and of course as time went on a lot of the good shows have moved to cable/dish and we still get all the adds on top of it. And on top of that you pay a ton of money for tv a month now and they still have the balls to ask you to pay a la carte for a bunch of stations or pay a whole nother price for a higher "teir" of programming.
None of this might ever happen in gamming.....but it's headed in that direction and blizzard is helping to pave the way.
Well from their reports they dont plan on adding anything themselves but they left their posts very vague and open...
Does Blizzard plan to post weapons, armor, and other such items for sale in the currency-based version of the auction house?
The currency-based auction house is a place for players to purchase or sell items they’ve obtained within the game. Blizzard does not plan to post items that affect gameplay, such as gear or character-enhancing runes, for sale in the auction house.
Will Blizzard sell anything directly through the auction house?
We don't have any plans at this time to post items for sale in the auction house.
Does the currency-based auction house signify a shift in Blizzard’s business and revenue model?
We’ve always tailored our business models to match what we’ve felt would be most appropriate and effective for each game and in each region, and that’s the case with Diablo III as well. The item-based nature of Diablo gameplay has always lent itself to an active trade-based ecosystem, and a significant part of this trade has been conducted through unsecure third-party organizations. This has led to numerous customer-service and game-experience issues that we’ve needed to account for. Our primary goal with the Diablo III auction house system is for it to serve as the foundation for a player-driven economy that’s safe, fun, and accessible for everyone.
What’s Blizzard’s cut?
As with other online auction sites and real-world auction houses, our fee structure will vary by region. However, we plan to collect a nominal fixed transaction fee for each item listed in the auction house. This fee consists of a fixed charge to list the item, which is assessed whether or not the item is successfully sold, and an additional fixed charge that is assessed only if the item is sold. The listing portion of the fee, which helps encourage sensible listing prices and discourage the mass posting of items that are very low quality or would be of little interest to other players, will be waived for a limited number of transactions per account. For players who opt to have the proceeds of their auction house sales go to their third-party payment service account instead of to their Battle.net account, Blizzard will collect a separate “cash-out” fee. Specific details regarding these fees will be announced at a later date.
Warcraft is number 1. Has been, always will be. They have survived all the "wow killers", they survived Lord of the Rings ripping off Lich King to make their Witch King, and are still standing stronger than ever.
You know... without Lord of the Rings... there would have been no WoW as we know it. Just saying.
So wowluv4life
What exactly are you trying to tell us here? Are you saying a book written by J.R.R. Token that created a character by the name of the Lich King during 1937 to 1949 was a copy from a game that was made up in 2004? Dude are you 10 years old or what? Man you really need to put down the games and read alittle before you begin to make comment on stuff you don't know about. Sure the game came out after WoW but the lore and the books where already there years before gaming was even thought of and if anyone copied from anyone else it would be blizzard copied from Token's work and most gaming companies will tell you straight out that is where the whole inspiration came from even the dungeon role play (with dice i mind you) originated from Token's work. Get some knowledge kid and i really feel pity for you if you are not a kid. Lol
Blizzard may not want to admit it but their game is old, and people are getting sick of it. It happens to all games eventually. It just took longer for this one.
Comments
Before you try to act smart, try looking at the date of the link you sent me... Year old news is year old news, how about an update with current figures. Btw wrath was still out when that post was made... So yea
I said this several years ago when people were saying Warhammer was going to be a WoW Killer.
What is going to kill WoW is time not a new game. Eventually people are going to move on to a new thing.
Graphics were dated a long time ago, end game is basically the same since BC, (Raid or Dailies) At least the Rep grind isn't as bad as in the BC Days. Getting Shattar rep for my flying mount took forever in BC.
So people are going to move on. Almost everyone takes a break from WoW and eventually their break will become permanent. Probably around the time when Titan comes out.
As for me, I am really looking forward to "The Secret World" "World of darkness" and "ToR" I am currently trying Black prophecy but it isn't engaging enough to get me to stop playing WoW.
This and appearance tabs and I'm back!!!
(Edit: and gear dyes too and ability to hide shouler pads.)
GRIND sucks? You wanna be max level in a month?
Since when did society award easy-goers and lazy-fools?
MAKES ME PHOBIC OF STUPIDITY!
And you guys know that they don't pay for expansions in asia? expansions are free in Korea and China unlike EU/NA
GRIND sucks? You wanna be max level in a month?
Since when did society award easy-goers and lazy-fools?
MAKES ME PHOBIC OF STUPIDITY!
Look, Blizzard is ADMITTING to 300k lost subs.
I guarantee theres a hell of alot more then that. ALOT more......And they will continue to bleed subs. The game is old, dying. It had its day in the sun, now a slow death is in process..
/shrug
Whatever happened to the IN BIOWARE WE TRUST signatures?
That's a totally fair statement and I hope your right. I'm of the mind though that you will see more than just player auctions there. They would of course be listed as if they were by real players, but I have to play devil's advocate and say I find it hard to believe that blizzard won't be slipping some items into the AH, especially rarer, harder to get ones that would bring profit. And after a while they might not even try to hide it. It will start with vanity items and possibly go from there. Lets say best case scenario, even if they don't put the actual items up for sale, they are still from what i understand taking a "fee" from each transaction. That's going to add up fast and they are going to encourage this to get max profitability.
I'm not trying to be a total tool about this, but I really like playing a good mmo and where blizzard goes, the industry follows at the moment. I know it's all doom and gloom to say it's a pandora's box, but changes like this are hard to reverse, especially by one of the giants in the industry, and it's probably only going to get worse from here. There are a lot of things in the last few decades that went from art form/entertainment with resonable profit backing it, to totally commercial corporate entities that are being milked for every penny so millionaires can become billionaires (tv, sports, movies ect...). So they day might not be as far off as you think where you are paying 30-50 dollars a month for your favorite mmo, weather it be in actual subscription fees, or where it's a "free to play" game where you can't do half the actual content or get many of the good items unless you get nickled and dimed to death in mini transactions and a la carte fees.
I know, it sounds crazy now, but it also sounded crazy a few decades ago to say tv was ever going to cost much. Most good content on tv was free (paid for by advertisers). Now cable and dish subscriptions often cost 50-100 dollars a month to subscribe to, and of course as time went on a lot of the good shows have moved to cable/dish and we still get all the adds on top of it. And on top of that you pay a ton of money for tv a month now and they still have the balls to ask you to pay a la carte for a bunch of stations or pay a whole nother price for a higher "teir" of programming.
None of this might ever happen in gamming.....but it's headed in that direction and blizzard is helping to pave the way.
Not all who wander are lost...
Can't wait thil this game's shit dead and they put all their effort into D3 and a new mmo.
Ummm. Probably because we're getting tired being nickel & dimed for the same old crap.
Blizzard teams with Activi$ion. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
IN-GAME CASH SHOPS. Allowing people to sell items through Blizzard (Diablo III), etc.
Do I have to pay per pixel now? Will I get more now for gaming at a higher resolution?
Seriously. When does it end.
It's getting old, bros. Same redundant content / battlegrounds. Gamers are getting older - yearning for more "depth".
Sorry Blizzard but you take way to long between updates and Cata was just a major let down for me personally... I always defended Blizzard for taking so long to release new expansions and games because I knew they would be great, but after Cata that changed. I jumped over to Starcraft only to find out I can only play terran missions and have to wait years to complete the game... That's cool I'll just play Diablo III... Nevermind, I'll be waiting for years there too. Does anybody know if Diablo II has been fully updated?
Yeah, cataclysm failed to impress.
However, I think it's more than just that. Blizzard has basically trivialized the entire game over the past few years. When you had to really work at reaching the level cap, some people washed out along the way, but many more actually learned how to be good players as they played. Now, the journey to level cap is so ridiculously easy that no one washes out and bad players can reach the cap with out having improved much during the journey.
So, now something like 98% of the content that they invested so much money, time and man hours into is pointless filler and all that's left is an end game that's not for everyone, but populated by anyone who can rub two brain cells together and call it thought.
Not a good combination.
Brilliant exit strategy if they have WoW's replacement waiting in the wings, ready for launch as soon as they need it, but I don't get the impresion that is the case.
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
anyone else find it humerous that wow has lost more subs in the last year then every other AAA mmo on the market has total added up? /snicker
while this may not be the immediate undoing of wow to lose around 10% of its player base, losing over a million subs in 12 months has to have gotten the attention of the greedier money mongers over at blizzard that have been spending those billions of dollars on diamond encrusted toiletries and solid gold enimas.
I think it's humourous that people on here should try to make such a big deal out of it. It's truly desperate.
please get your facts straight Aion has over around 4 million, Rift is also close to one mill. I mean, I couldn't care less how many subs a game has but Blizzard losing subs should show everyone that the age of copying wowlike mechanics and removing deep progression is not gonna cut it forever.
Yes I had fun from Vanilla tilll 3.0 but then everything gone downhill extremely fast.
I think we'll see more creativity again, instead of one game for everyone, we'll see super easy games made for the FPS, wellfare and instant gratification crowd and very deep ones made for dedicated players plus some pure PVE and PVP games.
for me thats a win/win cause everyone will finally get the game they are looking for again.
We need a MMORPG Cataclysm asap, finish the dark age of MMORPGS now!
"Everything you're bitching about is wrong. People don't have the time to invest in corpse runs, impossible zones, or long winded quests. Sometimes, they just want to pop on and play."
"Then maybe MMORPGs aren't for you."
Rift is close to 1 mil? Have you been on the Earth recently? Why don't you take the most accurate sample size, you can possibly get - xfire and mathematically quantify the value somewhere closer to 350-400k. A bit above EVE and Lotro and close to Aion (excluding significant part of the Aion's Asian market).
REALITY CHECK
The above is actually false as of 4/08/2011 if we follow the poster's logic.
Hours
Wow=152335
Rift = 9897
Ratio is around 15:1
Calculate this to sub numbers in the same ratio:11.3M / 15 = 750k ish
So around 700k-800k.
'Close to 1M' seems accurate by your logic.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
I don't think the subscribers go down because Blizzard did anything specifically wrong. Sure, people can disagree with this or that, but that's mostly a matter of personal preferences. I think that in the end, it's just that most players have simply seen about everything (maybe except some 85 raids) in the game.
I tried now the "return to a week", and had the choice: Either grinding gear with my 85 chars so they can go raiding, or play with a low level twink. So I was twinking a bit. But I have just seen all the low level dungeons, so there is nothing new to experience. They're not exceptioanlly difficult either. And the immersion is killed by the dungeon finder and instant travel. For people like me, nothing is left.
Let's play Fallen Earth (blind, 300 episodes)
Let's play Guild Wars 2 (blind, 45 episodes)
Man, the total is down to 11.1ish million subs, Blizzard probably isn't panicing yet. If the subs keeps sinking then maybe they will, but I doubt that the suits will start panicing for a while. They have more than enough subs to keep making a profit, at least for a while. Could be due to a crappy economy, summer, peeps getting tired of grinding the same content, or any number of reasons. /shrug It's too early to claim the sky is falling or even get a little worried.
Honestly, they need to find a better way to extend content other than gating it by making you do the same dailies over and over to progress through an area. To move past the first phase of their new content, you have to do the same quests 15 days in a row...to reach the end of it, it's the same quests for 40 days in a row.
Personally I think it'd be nice if they added a content generator like they had in Ryzom or CoH; let people experience player-created dungeons. Instead of loot they could hand out tokens for dungeon completion for mounts/cosmetic things. What better way to add more content than having your playerbase doing the work for you?
WOW is a chore endgame, they should be grateful they kept peoples doing the chore for so long, now they are tired, finally. As for myself i've been tired for 2 years now.
Well i know at least one of those 300,000 left WoW to join our table top PnP rpg group. He was tired of the limitations in WoW, and rather enjoys the real social interaction that a live RPG offers.
Not really. Xfire does not really reflect or represent Asian market - as stated in the last sentence. So following my logic, you have to take into account that WoW has around 5m subscribers in EU/NA (according to several published articles on the state of the subscribtion base in EU/NA), in which case the Rift sub base would be down accordingly to 350-400k.
REALITY CHECK
Well from their reports they dont plan on adding anything themselves but they left their posts very vague and open...
Does Blizzard plan to post weapons, armor, and other such items for sale in the currency-based version of the auction house?
The currency-based auction house is a place for players to purchase or sell items they’ve obtained within the game. Blizzard does not plan to post items that affect gameplay, such as gear or character-enhancing runes, for sale in the auction house.
Will Blizzard sell anything directly through the auction house?
We don't have any plans at this time to post items for sale in the auction house.
Does the currency-based auction house signify a shift in Blizzard’s business and revenue model?
We’ve always tailored our business models to match what we’ve felt would be most appropriate and effective for each game and in each region, and that’s the case with Diablo III as well. The item-based nature of Diablo gameplay has always lent itself to an active trade-based ecosystem, and a significant part of this trade has been conducted through unsecure third-party organizations. This has led to numerous customer-service and game-experience issues that we’ve needed to account for. Our primary goal with the Diablo III auction house system is for it to serve as the foundation for a player-driven economy that’s safe, fun, and accessible for everyone.
What’s Blizzard’s cut?
As with other online auction sites and real-world auction houses, our fee structure will vary by region. However, we plan to collect a nominal fixed transaction fee for each item listed in the auction house. This fee consists of a fixed charge to list the item, which is assessed whether or not the item is successfully sold, and an additional fixed charge that is assessed only if the item is sold. The listing portion of the fee, which helps encourage sensible listing prices and discourage the mass posting of items that are very low quality or would be of little interest to other players, will be waived for a limited number of transactions per account. For players who opt to have the proceeds of their auction house sales go to their third-party payment service account instead of to their Battle.net account, Blizzard will collect a separate “cash-out” fee. Specific details regarding these fees will be announced at a later date.
http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/events/diablo3-announcement/#auction:auction-faq
Blizzard may not want to admit it but their game is old, and people are getting sick of it. It happens to all games eventually. It just took longer for this one.