http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/9572298889?page=5#83
Following is what I posted in response to someones thread.
But the AH was created with the idea of creating sustainable income to keep a full force dev team making patches.
I keep seeing comments like this with regards to the RMAH. When you consider the average salary of a full team of developers, you would need a fairly large amount of costly transactions per month. As Blizzard mentions though, this isn’t an MMO meant to see large amounts of updated content (most all of that work is commissioned up front where it was budgeted for). And that has pretty much been the case with Diablo III to date. The changes they did offer up was due to the piss poor state the game was released in. But even content like ubers weren’t necessarily new content per se because it reused currently existing models/layouts with a few tweaks to mechanics and graphics.
The way I look at it, they had to waste additional development and engineering time (unseen expenses) to implement some of these changes including the ones we are still waiting on (itemization and a more fitting version of PvP). Realize that an untold amount of engineering and development hours were thrown away when they killed off Team Deathmatch. And who knows what sort of impact all of this has had on how certain systems would be implemented in expansion #1 (which is likely what the original D3 team was being tasked to primarily work on).
The above is not meant to give the D3 team a pass though. This is the design they iterated to and those decisions have led to the consequences regarding having to spend additional man hours fixing the game. My point is that while D3 made the company a decent profit, they are having to spend additional engineering and development resources which weren’t budgeted for. And I personally don’t see the revenues generated from RMAH sales as even covering those costs (let alone, a full development team).
So while there may have been some ulterior motives in that regards (with the RMAH), if Blizzard really wanted to milk cash from the player base, they could have resorted to micro transactions. Want cosmetic effects or the ability to change the way your gear looks, charge a fee like the following:
Want some form of in-game pet which takes the place of the scroll of companion pets (that were removed) that went around collecting gold for you? That will cost you some more money like the following:
Want extra stash space or character slots, they could make a bundle load more of money here since they can factor in a sizable margin to pay for the extra data storage this would entail. Same goes for the ability to change character name/sex, extra battle tag name changes (beyond the one free one that is allowed), etc.
As a matter of fact, I believe Blizzard has failed to fully monetize the game in that regards IF (priority wise) they were looking at additional streams of revenue from the initial point of sale. Thus I tend to look at the RMAH as a somewhat failed experiment which had unintended consequences (from Blizzards perspective) for the game. It did have goals like being a sanctioned real money market meant to supplant/be a safer alternative to 3rd party sites while possibly being an experiment to gather data on whether the amount of transactions could actually be a viable source of recurring revenue for some other IP in the future.
