If you were looking to make some sweet cash munnies selling your gear on Diablo III’s real-money auction house, you’re going to have to wait a bit longer – Blizzard has announced that the launch has been delayed from its expected date next week to an unconfirmed new date.
“Despite very aggressive projections, our preparations for the launch of the game did not go far enough,” wrote Blizz community manager Micah “Bashiok” Whipple over on the Battle.net forums.
“In order to make sure everything is continuing to run as it should, we’ve decided to move out our target launch for the real-money auction house beyond our original estimated date of May 22. We’ll post further updates on that in the near future.”
In the meantime, though, it seems most of the server problems have been sorted out. According to Whipple, Blizz is “continuing to monitor performance globally and will be taking further measures as needed to ensure a positive experience for everyone”, so that’s lovely. I’m hoping that includes free pizza.
Source: Battle.net
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I don’t think so on the gambling point. Diablo III potentially generates items which you can sell, but it’s no different to what you were doing in Diablo II; it’s just that the process of selling the item is formalised through Blizzard. When you place the item in the Auction house – from what I understand – you set the price and Blizzard takes a cut.
If you were expected to repurchase Diablo III each time you played through, pay a subscription fee, had a random price attributed to the item by the Auction House or were able to buy “drop modifiers” that might increase the rate of rare item drops without a guarantee of a defined and fixed rate of return, it would likely be considered gambling.
With regards to tax – well, that’s a completely grey area. How does one tax digital items? Are you selling items from your location, or are you selling items at the server’s location? What tax laws apply? Possibly some MyGaming journalist could dig/comment into/on the topic, it would be interesting.