As most gamers know, Diablo 3 will be launching with a Real Money Auction House (RMAH).  You’ll be able to sell and buy items, with real money, in game.  What was unknown until now was the cost of doing business.

All wearable items (armor, weapons, etc..) will come with a 1$ transaction fee.  Commodities will cost 15% of the value per transaction.  It will also cost you 15% of the value when you post.  Finally, when moving money to a 3rd party (like PayPal) will again charge 15%.  Oh, and you can only post 10 auctions at any given time.

This essentially puts a bottom on the entire market where people will put a value on their time.  Let’s say you want minimum wage of 6$ per hour or about 50$ a day.  You need to make 5$ per transaction profit, so you need to sell items at $7 and commodities at $6.50 per stack – or thereabouts.

Now as much as this seems like a good deal, you have to figure if people are going to pay $7 for a shield or for a gem.  So if you sell everything you “make” $50 but it also cost you $15 to make it.  Undercutting by a few pennies will be required but that just means that the next person to post increases your odds of not selling and you’re still out of pocket.

This isn’t EBay where there is great diversity and little competition on the actual items.  The actual posting fees are fixed too.  Blizzard is going to make a killing on this and people are going to make pennies – if that.