How much for those sweet pickaxes, bro?
Image courtesy Blizzard

Diablo III will allow players to buy and sell their stashes of loot with real-life currency, developer Blizzard said on Monday.

The hotly anticipated role-playing game will feature an online auction house in which players can hawk almost everything they find in the game for either in-game gold or real money. The company calls it a “convenient, powerful, and fully integrated” solution for players who want to turn their green boots into greenbacks.

By using a real-money auction house in Diablo III, the company is attempting to wrest control away from the lucrative gold-farming industry and back into its own hands.

“Acquiring items has always been an important part of the Diablo series, but the previous games have not had a robust, centralized system for facilitating trades, and as a result players have turned to inconvenient and potentially unsafe alternatives, such as third-party real-money-trading organizations,” Blizzard said.

While Diablo III still has no official release date, Blizzard is currently in the midst of a beta testing program open to a select group of consumers.

Diablo III transactions can be carried out for in-game currency or real-world moolah.
Image: Blizzard

“Blizzard identified a sizable secondary market and wanted to control it for their own (substantial) financial benefit,” Dubious Quality analyst Bill Harris said in an e-mail to Wired.com. “They can also claim that by bringing in the secondary market under their umbrella, they will be providing a better quality of experience for their players. And that’s true, certainly, but it’s also certainly true that if there was no additional money to be made, they wouldn’t be interested.”

Blizzard will also take its own cut, in the form of two separate fees on each transaction. Sellers will have to pay a fixed charge to list each item, whether or not it is sold, and an additional fixed charge when an item is purchased.

The publisher says the purpose of the listing fee is to encourage players to only list items that they think other people will be interested in buying. It said it plans to waive a certain number of listing fees for each account, though it did not give specific details.

Harris says we can expect to see more mechanics like this in the future as gamemakers try to find supplemental income streams that go beyond the standard, one-time-purchase model.

“The barn door’s broken off its hinges when it comes to things like this,” he said. “There’s no going back.”