Jay Wilson: We'd Turn Off Diablo III's Auction House If We Could

Speaking at his GDC panel entitled Shout at the Devil: The Making of Diablo III, former game director Jay Wilson came out and said it: the controversial Real-Money Auction House hasn't panned out the way Blizzard thought it would, and they'd probably pull the plug if it were an easy thing to do.

Even though Wilson believes the RMAH has accomplished the goal of reducing account fraud (third-party Diablo 2 item trading sites frequently stole passwords and credit card information), and asserts that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that many people do want it based on the number of transactions happening daily, Wilson now freely admits it was "the wrong solution" to the problems Blizzard was trying to solve. "It's not good for a game like Diablo. It doesn't feel good to get items for money, it feels good to get items by killing monsters," he said, echoing the complaints of a vocal group of fans.

In hindsight, maybe this wasn't the best idea.

So why not do the obvious and remove it entirely? According to Wilson, almost a year after its May 7, 2012 launch Diablo III still pulls in a million players every day, and more than three million unique players every month. That's a pretty staggering number of players for any game, and a higher-than-expected percentage of them use the AH. Wilson says that prior to release, Blizzard had expected only rare and valuable items would be listed, but in reality many players put "nearly everything" up for real-money sale because "there's no reason not to." Without knowing how many of its currently loyal players would leave if the auction houses were to suddenly go away, it's not a chance they're able to take lightly. "It's something team talks about every week and wants to fix," says Wilson, who has since moved on to another unannounced project at Blizzard.

It raises an interesting question: many people in the IGN community have made it clear that the RMAH contributed to their giving up Diablo III sooner than they expected, but how many would return if Blizzard were to respond and turn it off tomorrow?

Source : feeds[dot]ign[dot]com