There's going to be real money for items trading in Diablo no matter what blizzard does (or doesn't) do about it. There's no way they can police it. It's impossible - if they spend thousands of dollars trying to get one site shut down, they just reopen 30 minutes later under a new name, and the process has to start over again. They can try to track who's buying items... but let's just say I know people that have been buying LARGE amounts of gold in WoW for 6 years without so much as a warning. If they go after the sellers' accounts, they run into the same problem since they can just switch IP addresses and restart with a new account 5 minutes later. Instead of allowing that to happen on third party sites where players feel they have to go to be competitive with others doing the same thing, they now go through the game itself. It's secure, no risk of identity theft or scamming, no needing to go to sites that are potentially malicious in search of a "legit" one to buy the item you want. Blizzard essentially just put gold/item selling websites out of business. I'll grant that this isn't a good move for competitive play, and if Blizzard wants the competitive portion of the game (ie, Arenas) to have any "e-sport" appeal, they will, of course, have to make items used there be earned through other methods ("arena points" of some description earned directly through playing arenas). But it should be stressed that that was going to be true no matter if they controlled the real-money market or let third party sites do it -- this announcement, regardless of what else you think about it, has zero impact on that aspect.