You bring something I was vaguely aware of. Modran brought up the FinCEN’s regulations on convertible virtual currencies:
Diablo 3 - Why the Auction House got Removed
That’s all really interesting, but you could you provide the source, or between whom these conversation is taking place?
Because the official version Blizzard provided to it’s players and clients was, that they are trying to make the game better. They never publically acknowledged or admited, that they’ve had issues with FinCEN or the IRS.
I am not form the US, but I’ve heard about the IRS here and there and they seem completely crazy. This seems absolutely crazy and unreasonable. Blizzard should have brought it to light.
Forgive me, but I can’t help but think of a funncy scenario. Imagine a boyfriend and a girlfriend playing Diablo, and the girlfriend giving her boyfriend a ** for an item. If the IRS were to find about it, I’m sure they would wanna tax that, too!
That’s true. However,
the way I understand it, the issue was with convertible virtual currencies. D3 gold had a price that was convertible to USD and you could see how much D3 gold you would get for how much USD, and you would see how USD you would get for certain amount of D3 gold. That’s what made gold to be a convertible virtual currency.
You take out the Auction Houses and the gold, you allow an item to be traded for another item, limit the times an item can be traded to once, and you’re golden.
And sure, there will be crazies who pay real money on a third parti site, then trade a crap item for a good item in-game. But Blizzard can’t reasonably be expected to keep track of that.
Come the f on, let players play the game.
Yep. Blizzard lied. The whole “we wanted to make the game better” was a lie, plain and simple. They simply didn’t wanna pay for the special license in order to keep convertible virtual currencies in D3.
Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure they are paying that license for WoW and the WoW Token. There’s no way the WoW token doesn’t fall under convertible virtual currencies.
They cut major features out of Vanilla D3 and didn’t compensate the player base in any way. They bricked the basic version of the game. inb4 “RoS got free cool updates like the cube”. I am pretty sure players had to pay for RoS and didn’t get it for free.
But you never hear video game critics bring this up (because they are barely capable of surface lvl analysis, and don’t see the essence of things), they can only cry about loot boxes in Overwatch (which are probably the least offensive implementation of that monetization model, compared to other implementations anyways), but they’ll never bring up “Hey, where are my Vanilla D3 features such as trading and PvP Arenas?”.