Breath_of_the_Dying
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2007
- Messages
- 1,454
I really doubt they make that much money from the Auction house....In fact it may very well be possible they lose money on it. So they get 15% of each transaction and assuming they don't split any of that with ebay or anyone else how much would it cost to break even over the cost of the equipment, electricity and manpower to maintain the auction house.
D3 sold around 10 million. Lets assume the average person spent 10 bucks on the RMAH ( I feel that is WAY higher than what the average actually is BTW) so that makes 100 Million and 15% of that is 15 million. This is chump change in the grand scale of things. Take into account the cost of the servers, facilities, and people maintaining them and its probably pretty close to breakeven...Drop in the RMAH development cost and the fact that the RMAH usage has dwindled to near nothing and profitability is more and more unlikely.
So from a financial standpoint I can definitely see them seeing the Auction House as an unprofitable investment for D3 thus not caring about doing account bound items.
In fact Blizzard probably made more money off of diablo 2 sales then RMAH....So they are likely truly trying to find ways to get people to continue to invest into Diablo 3 by making real improvements.
My knowledge is limited though. If the average spent in the RMAH is 100 bucks then I am dead wrong and they are making a pretty solid profit.
WOW> Skorn + shield with 10% crit chance and 300 strength seems pretty broken and awesome too me.
There's more revenue than you think. A lot of money stays in the bnet system and each transaction is money made.
Even if people only put $10 into the system, a lot of people that sell items turn around ad buy items with the money they make. So instead of blizzard making 1.50 from the $10, they might make closer to $4 if people keep turning around and buying items.
It's no cash revenue like Wow subscription, but I'm pretty sure the profit margin is still good even after all the other money is needed.