Some players in the D3 community have been a little outraged over what’s being viewed as an excessive 15% double-dip Blizzard will be applying to RMAH sales. Of course, the 15% cut only applies when players are looking to transfer the funds to their PayPal account. For players intending to use their Battle.net Balance, the 15% fee does not apply.
Personally, I don’t think the 15% is too bad, but then again…I’m not looking to profit from the RMAH. I’m planning on keeping some funds in my Battle.net Balance – solely for use in the RMAH. However, if I do get lucky enough to happen upon an extremely rare and highly sought after “Axe of the Frozen Dude” – I would gladly sell it for some real cash and happily allow Blizzard to get their 15% cut for said service.
For low ticket items I could see where this might prohibit some folks from using the RMAH, as you’re already having to pay the $1 transaction fee, but for more expensive stuff…15% really isn’t so bad.
What’s really nice about the RMAH service is that there are no costs attached if items do not sell. In other words, there is no risk. Blizzard only get their cut if your item sells. I like that.
Here’s a recent Blue response from Bashiok – in which he breaks down equipment vs commodity listing fees – and offers examples as to how this will work.
Quote from Bashiok
As others have pointed out there’s a $1 transaction for any item such as armor, weapons, etc. which is only taken if the item sells. So that’s the flat $1 fee for those types of items, and honestly I would personally expect most people to be interested in both selling and buying these types of character improvements.
Separately, there is a 15% transaction fee for any commodities (again, only if they sell), which are items that stack such as gems and gold. We take a percentage due to the way commodity sales work. You can put up 50,000 gold for sale, and because people can buy portions of commodity auctions, one person may buy 10,000, another may buy 30,000 and maybe nobody buys the remaining 10,000. Instead of charging $1 per transaction, which certainly wouldn’t be fair to the seller in the case of commodities as they have no control over how many different people may buy from their auction, we go with a percentage. If that original 50,000 goes up for say $5, there would be a $0.45 fee on the 30,000, and a $0.15 fee for the 10,000, totaling a $0.60 fee for the sales that occurred.
Just to be triply clear, these fees only happen if the item sells. Putting an item or stack of items up to see if it/they will sell doesn’t have any inherent risks, and is a good way to get some Battle.net Balance built up. You can sell items you don’t want, and then get something to spend on something you do want. (Source)
15% doesn’t sound so bad now, does it..?
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