On the real money auction house pictures floating around the web, there is a tab for “Gold”. This means it is legal to buy and sell gold. Great news, everybody! This makes it easier to make money off this game! There is also a “Characters” tab, but Blizzard have stated, that that feature won’t be in at launch, but might be added at a later point. They might as well do this, or that extra money goes to the gray market and not down Activision’s pockets!
Diablo 3 auction house. Notice the "Characters" and the "Gold" tab
If we factor in gold buying in making money off of Diablo 3, a lot depends on the exchange rate of gold. Most likely you would be able to buy gold, and buy the item on the gold money auction house cheaper, than if you were to use real money and buy the item directly on the real money auction house.
This is because there will most likely be professional people goldfarming, working under sweatshop conditions, getting a low hourly wage, so the gold can be sold cheaper than you can get it yourself. In addition to farmers, you have your average Joes selling gold for real money.
So most likely, you will be better off buying and selling on the gold money auction house! That is not half bad, because you can buy gold with real money without getting in trouble with Blizzard. If that is the case….THEN HOW THE HELL DO YOU MAKE MONEY OFF THIS STUPID GAME?!
A money making strategy off the top of my head, would be to focus on scarcity. There will be a lot of people selling items and gold, but there won’t be a lot of people selling ultra-rare stuff. The lootdroptables automatically limit these people. So you would be able to get a decent price for these items on the real money auction house. Then how do you get these items? First and foremost, focus on selling 95% of your stuff on the gold money auction house. Even go so far as to buy gold, if the exchange rate dips. With the gold you acquire, you buy highlevel items and sell them on the real money auction house.
Example:
A lvl 7 rune sells for 20 USD or 5000 G. If you can buy 5000 G for less then 20 USD, you are better off doing that. Maybe you can buy 5000 G for 15 USD, which means you can buy the rune for 5000 G and sell it for 20 USD, netting you 5 USD profit.
Mind you, it isn’t riskfree; you will incur transactionfees and the risk of not selling the rune at 20 USD.
Depending on the buy/sell price of gold, the current exchange rate of gold/real money and the price differential between the real money auction house and gold money auction house, this strategy might also only work one way. In the above example, to do it the other way round, we would buy a rune for 20 USD and sell it for 5000 G, and then sell the 5000 G for 15 USD, which would incur us a loss of 5 USD. Instead, to make money, you would need to able to either sell gold expensively or buy the rune cheap with real money. If you could buy a rune for 10 USD, sell it for 5000G and then sell the gold for 15 USD, you would again make a 5 USD profit.
All this will change a few months after launch, but I am saving that one for another post!
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Interesting find. The arbitrage opportunity between the auction houses will naturally lead to player to make a comparison. Can I buy gold and get a comparable item in gold auction house for cheaper? It will also lead to economic parity between the two houses (although volatile at first). As gold supply increases and gold prices will fall. Inflation should occur in the gold auction house over time. For players unwilling invest real money as currency, it could be more and more difficult to acquire desirable items with gold earned from normal play, although this inflation will be somewhat checked by flood of items into the market as the money supply increases. It’s more normative to think a player will not waste huge amounts time pillaging gold to buy a marginally better item, and the price of real price of items will get pushed higher and higher. Could Blizzard peg the dollar to the gold unit? I see problems with this option.
It all depends how much the player is using the auction house. If he is only getting gold through grinding and vendoring thrash and items, then he can’t keep with inflation. If he is selling as many items as he can on the auction house, while still grinding for gold, he should be able to keep up better.
And Blizzard wouldn’t be able to peg gold to the dollar. If they had an artificially high fixed dollar price of gold, less would be sold. Then the gold sellers would flood the gold money auction house, buy items and sell these items on the real money auction house to raise cash. Buyers of these items could then turn around and sell the items on the gold money auction house and get gold. This would create a lot of inflation on the gold money auction house.
Of course, Blizzard could then fix the price of items on the real money auction house, so it was on par with the fixed price of gold. But, again, that would depend on how much said item sold for on the gold money auction house. And since that price is floating, you can’t do that….unless of course you fix the price of items on the gold money auction house. And then you have just made both auction houses in to a vendor and killed them.
So you can’t have a fixed market besides a floating market, and have free flow of goods between the two markets.
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