It's not easy being a bank. Blizzard's experiment with a real-money trading system in its game Diablo III has come to an end. It is a good thing too. By embedding real money in its service, Blizzard was vitiating any claim that D3 was separate from the real economy and therefore not subject to real world taxes and laws. What a terrible precedent that would have made.
Is the unreported income of the players who made thousands of dollars off Diablo 2 not just as taxable as the unreported income of the players who made thousands of dollars off Diablo 3?
I think there's a danger of creating an expectation of onus on the games company. It's really not Blizzard's business if people use their software to make money then don't report it any more than it's Microsoft's responsibility to make sure journalists using Word pay their taxes.
Posted by: Stabs | Sep 19, 2013 at 17:11