Diablo III Ex-Director Admits Auction House Hurt the Game

Joystiq is reporting that, during a panel at GDC, former Diablo III director Jay Wilson admitted that the auction house (both real money and in-game gold) hurt the game, and that Blizzard’s assumptions on how it would turn out ended up being off-base. Here’s a snip:

He thought they would help reduce fraud, that they’d provide a wanted service to players, that only a small percentage of players would use it and that the price of items would limit how many were listed and sold.

But he said that once the game went live, Blizzard realized it was completely wrong about those last two points. It turns out that nearly every one of the game’s players (of which there are still about 1 million per day, and about 3 million per month, according to Wilson) made use of either house, and that over 50 percent of players used it regularly. That, said Wilson, made money a much higher motivator than the game’s original motivation to simply kill Diablo, and “damaged item rewards” in the game. While a lot of the buzz around the game attacked the real money Auction House, “gold does much more damage than the other one does,” according to Wilson, because more players use it and prices fluctuate much more.

Thanks, Game Informer.