In what seems to be a long time coming, Blizzard is finally closing down both of its in-game auction houses in Diablo III. While it isn’t a huge shock that the real world cash house where people could literally pay their way to get a better character is closing, it is a little bit surprising that they are also taking down the in-game gold auction house as well.

While the real cash auction house was essentially power leveling on steroids, the gold auction house should have theoretically worked in line with the game’s economy but it is likely there was some level of either drastic inflation or deflation on value of the game’s currency at hand to make Blizzard come to such a drastic decision.

In an email that went out at the end of day yesterday, Blizzard addressed the closure to Diablo III players:

Don’t worry. We aren’t giving any more awards to Angry Birds. At least not today. But we do have four more games for the best of 2012. If you haven’t seen the previous two days awards, click here for Monday’s and here for Tuesday’s awards. Make sure to check back tomorrow for our final specialty awards and then again on Friday for the ultimate award from The Flickcast and Bitcast teams, the Game of the Year.

New IP With the Most Potential – Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

With writing from R. A. Salvatore and art design by Todd McFarlane, many would have thought that Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning would have the makings of a surefire hit. With over 300,000 units sold by March of 2012, Reckoning gave a good showing for a brand new IP and had many people talking about it. Unfortunately due to financial problems with a loan from the state of Rhodes Island, 38 Studios was forced to close and with it went the possible future of the Kingdoms of Amalur series.

Despite coming from a brand new studio, Reckoning had all the makings of a hit game. Beautiful design, interesting and complex story with tons of back matter and, the most important, incredibly fun combat and gameplay. It was a huge world with tons to do that players could get lost in. Whether or not they even cared about the narrative, there were unending areas to explore and enemies to vanquish. Now, one can only hope that someone else picks up this IP and gives it a second chance to continue giving more people the chance to explore its epic world.

Yesterday, Activision Blizzard had its second quarter earnings call and surprisingly the focus of the call was not around either World of Warcraft or Call of Duty. Instead it was Diablo III that was heralded as the biggest winner of the past quarter for the company. Diablo III scored more than 10,000,000 units sold since its release.

Also not surprising if you know any kids who play games is that Skylanders, including toy sales, was the best selling game for the first half of 2012. CEO Bobby Kotick also made sure to add that the toy sales of Skylanders outsold the highest selling toy lines in both the US and Europe.

As a result of the $1.05 billion dollars in overall earnings, predictions have gone up a full million for their $4.3 billion in expected earnings for the year. Still to come this year, Activision Blizzard has a full lineup for the remainder of the year with World of Warcraft’s Mists of Pandaria expansion , the juggernaut of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, the toy powerhouse Skylanders Giants and franchise player Transformers: Fall of Cybertron featuring the dinobots. With the last Call of Duty breaking the billion dollar mark on top of these other huge titles, Activision Blizzard looks to maintain its top spot in the gaming world.

With a game as hyped as Diablo III, there have been lots of stories circulating around the net since its launch last week. The first was someone who fought through the crashing servers and was able to complete the game in just 13 hours. The next tale came about someone who did a speed run and beat the entire game in six hours after an 11 year wait to get his hands on the game.

There were even reports of someone getting a character to level sixty within the first few days of launch, not to mention the thousands of people who took off work to play the game on launch. But with the crazed fandom, there also comes the possibility of tragedy as well.

Tech blog Buildstarted.com was the first to report the first real world Diabo III related death. Buildstarted reports the loss of his friend and coworker, 32 year old Russell Shirley. After not hearing from his friend for two days, the writer called Shirley’s landlady who found Russell in front of his computer, lost to an apparent heart attack which may have been caused by his gaming binge.

For those of you anxiously awaiting news of a release data for Blizzard’s Diablo III, this post is for you. That’s right fans, Blizzard on Thursday announced that the highly anticipated follow-up to the hit game Diablo II will be available on May 15th.

However, that’s not the best part. Digital copies of Diablo III can be pre-ordered starting today for $59.99. Call it a late Xmas present if you want.

In case you’re not familiar with Diablo III, it picks up twenty years later with a new generation of heroes who must face the forces of evil. In the game, players will be able to choose from a barbarian, a monk, a demon hunter, a witch doctor and a wizard.

For more, click through for the full press release from Blizzard.

Just passing its fifteenth anniversary, the Diablo series has become known as the quintessential loot grabbing dungeon crawling RPG on the PC. With only two formal releases, the third installment of Diablo is set to come out this year from Blizzard. While fans of the series have clamored for more, they also know that Blizzard is not a company to rush a game if it isn’t ready and have earned a reputation for quality because of this. As a result, Diablo III may be the most anticipated game of 2012.

Returning from Diablo II will be the Barbarian, the game’s standard melee class but with a reworked skillset. Also in the melee vein will be the new Monk class. The Wizard will debut similar to the sorcerer from Diablo and sorceress from Diablo II.

New to the series will be the Witch Doctor, similar in playstyle to the Necromancer from Diablo II and a new rogue-like character known as the Demon Hunter possessing ranged abilities, traps and evasion tactics.

This week, Gazillion Entertainment announced that David Brevik would be placed as studio director at Gargantuan, the studio house developing the Marvel massive multiplayer online game. After originally being scrapped by Cryptic Studios in favor of Champions Online, Gazillion entertainment had been filling its ranks up under the weather by recruiting members of Apple, Blizzard, Pixar and Microsoft Game Studios to create their team.

Now with the addition of David Brevik who has been credited as leader programmer, project lead and design lead of both Diablo games, gamers should feel confident in the studio’s ability to deliver on the multiplayer experience required for a quality MMO. But can the Marvel Universe MMOG survive in a landscape already dominated by the behemoth World of Warcraft. Other properties like the Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings and Warhammer have taken shots at unseating Warcraft but have thus been unsuccessful.

Even other strong properties outside of the medievil time frame have fallen short like the ill-fated Star Wars Galaxies and the Matrix Online. What may be Marvel’s biggest threats though come from the blossoming superhero MMOG genre that has been popping up over recent years, the pinnacle being City of Heroes/City of Villains which came in to legal trouble with Marvel and DC for such robust character creation tools that many players were able to create incredible likenesses of their favorite proprietary heroes.