How Much Will 1,000 Gold Sell for in Diablo 3?

When it comes to how much gold will be worth in Diablo 3, people have already made a few guesses and I’ve even thrown out some hypothetical #s ($1 for 1,000 gold, $0.10 for 1,000 gold, etc). These guesses serve mostly to get our brains thinking about how the economy will work in Diablo 3 so that we are ahead of the curve. If you’re not into that sort of thing, you can pass on this article completely.

World of Warcraft

I’m going to use World of Warcraft as my bench mark. I did a quick search for ‘buy gold in world of warcraft’ and found some of these advertisements:

  • $5.22 for 5,000 gold
  • $9.94 for 10,000 gold
  • $33.87 for 35,000 gold
  • $114.80 for 120,000 gold
  • $109.99 for 100,000 gold
  • $11.99 for 10,000 gold
  • etc..

So as you can see, the price is sitting right around $11 for 10,000 gold, or $1.1 for 1,000 gold. I did not test any of these services to find out if there were added fees. There is certainly an added risk to getting banned which should send prices slightly higher than they would be if it was legal to sell gold. This is true whenever something is made illegal, it just costs more and requires taking more risks in a black market to acquire the good (think prohibition of alcohol). I’m not going to adjust the $1.10/1k figure, but we’ll keep in mind that it might be worth a little less for later.

How long does it take to make 1,000 gold? Many players make that each day by doing almost no work, just by running auction systems that practically craft and sell items for them. If you still play WoW and aren’t making this gold, it’s worth checking out Hayden’s gold guide which teaches you how to do all of this. I doubt this is what the gold-sellers do though. I figure they either buy gold from players and/or use low-income labor to farm it for them. I’ve seen people estimate that they can make 3,000-4,000 gold farming (Pyrite Ore selling for 10g). I don’t think this is possible anymore, I’ll use 2,000 gold for now since prices are about half that.

That means that 1 hour of farming in World of Warcraft is worth roughly $2.20. Remember, you can swap numbers in and out to recalculate that amount based on your experience.

Diablo 3 – Beta

In the beta I was able to make 25,000 gold/hr farming. It might be even more now, I’m still in the process of catching up after the latest wipe and I’m not sure I’m going to do it again before the release. If 1 hour of beta-time is worth $2.20 then that means 25,000 gold is worth $2.20, meaning that 1,000 gold in the beta could be worth $0.09!

Diablo 3 – Release

Gold is going to be worth a lot initially and less later in the game. Just about anyone will be able to farm the 25,000 gold/hr in the first few days, meaning that gold will be worth way less than 7 cents per 1k. However, most players won’t be selling their gold, that’s why you should sell your gold ASAP. How much gold/hr will a level 60 player be able to earn farming Inferno content? It’s too hard to say, but I’ll guess that they’ll be farming millions an hour within a month after the game is released. If they can farm 1,000,000/hr that makes 1,000 gold worth 2/10ths of a penny, or roughly 2 pennies per 10,000 gold.

I don’t think we can make a more accurate guess than that. We’ll see gold peak initially at 5-10 cents for 1,000 gold and then plummet well below a penny in the first month after the game. It might get stuck on its drop as players who reach Inferno content refuse to sell their gold but instead craft, combine and repair. This is also assuming that Blizzard doesn’t dramatically change the gold drop rates between now and then.

Radiant Star

If 10,000 gold is worth 2.2 pennies then a Radiant Star gem, which will be cost AT LEAST 500 billion gold to create, will be worth $11,000,000 (eleven million US dollars). Based on that number you can assume that gold will be easier to farm or people just won’t craft or buy Radiant Stars.

Before you comment, keep in mind I already realize that I pulled some of the numbers out of my ass. If you have better numbers or just want to swap them in go ahead. Even with the numbers I used it should give us a general idea of what we’re getting into.

Important: Many of the strategies and tips I share here were originally inspired by the people at the Diablo 3 Gold Secrets Forum. If you're serious about making the big bucks in Diablo 3, or just being the best players, you need to signup ASAP.

Leave a comment

9 Comments.

  1. Yeah, I agree for the most part. I expect gold to stabilize at $0.01 per 1000 or even less. Like you said, it is probably easy to farm 1 million gold per hour at level 60.

  2. “I figure they either buy gold from players and/or use low-income labor to farm it for them.”

    I think this is highly unlikely, due to the crackdown on botting software by Blizzard and the relative poor gold/hour that farming produces.

    The majority of WoW gold that you can buy will come from compromised (hacked) accounts. This is a far easier and cost effective way of a single individual or small team to gain large amounts of gold.

  3. @ Amex, why do you think they want you to sign up so bad here,having your email adress is 90% of the work,then the’ll just spam you with threath about your account being banned if you don’t sign in on a link they provide. This whole site is a scam.

  4. Ha ha, don’t use your Bnet email then Coppers :roll:

  5. How can you compare WoW economy to Diablo 3? 10,000 gold for $11! HA! I have millions of gold in diablo 3. more than i ever hoped to make in WoW so you cant compare the prices there. Its gunna be more like… $.25 for 100,000 gold… or around $3 for a million. You do realize that people have over 200mil in gold on diablo. Which by ur hypothesis means they have $220,000 worth of gold… if you went on in the article and explained that it will probably be less. Then sorry about this comment i stopped reading it.

    • Hey “bob”, this was written in April, almost a month before the game was released. Better late than never eh?

    • Also note I tried to connect time spent in WoW to earn gold to time spent in Diablo 3. I think I did pretty good considering the information I had.

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